


dark rooms and spinning heads

by blueparacosm



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 21 & over au, Alcohol, Alternate Universe- Modern Setting - Freeform, Angst, Childhood Friends, Codependency, Flashbacks, Humor, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Internalized Homophobia, Kinda funny kinda sad, M/M, Religious Guilt, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sexuality Confusion, Slow Burn, canon-typical rudeness, not-really-unrequited love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-10-28 19:19:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10837731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/pseuds/blueparacosm
Summary: Murphy takes off up the stairs with bounding steps, heavy black boots plundering through shallow, golden puddles of spilled drinks and- is that milk?“Pick your adventures, Professor!” his disembodied voice calls from around the corner, as if nothing had changed since they’d been laced together by the bricks of a cowboy bar, all warm breaths and eyes glowing orange under streetlamps that had only known honesty.





	1. don't threaten me with a good time

**Author's Note:**

> the 21 & over + murphamy au that genuinely nobody, including me, wanted
> 
> i hate myself and i do not own this plot or any of these characters as if you couldnt tell by the fact that this is gay fanfic on ao3
> 
> also i've changed the summary atleast 18 times since posting because im trying to find the best way to fool people into thinking this is a good fic

The campus rolls by in flashes of gray and bustling bodies, Gothic buildings standing proud against yellowing lawns in the thick of autumn. “Are you seeing this? This shit is beautiful,” he muses, prominent nose pressing against the foggy glass in the backseat of a cab that is more vomit-stench than oxygen. He tilts the Pabst aluminum to his lips and takes a long swig, and the cabbie turns another easy left, jolting him into the window.

Oblivious to the potential nose-bleed in his backseat, the driver, sounding vaguely Jersey, asks “You go here?”

Murphy traces the lip of the can with a fingertip, laughs a little to himself. “Nah, I’m too dumb. My friend from high school does though. Kid’s a genius,” his chin tucks involuntarily into his neck and he lets out a bubbly burp, prompting the driver to glance up into the rear-view mirror with a grimace.

“Are you drinking a beer in my cab?”

Murphy meets his narrowed eyes in the mirror, takes another sip. “No, dude. What are you talking about?" He wipes bubbling foam from the leather with a finger, looks up, and nearly jumps out of his skin when he sees him. "Oh- there he is, the nerdy buff dude in the green blazer. Honk for me, will ‘ya?” The cabbie hesitates, leaving the rowdy passenger behind him to lean over his shoulder and slam a fist into the horn, once, twice. The tan-skinned man leaning against a bus stop column perks up, an easy grin flitting onto his face as he struts out to the cab. “God, what is he wearing? He looks like a tool.”

The door to Murphy’s right clicks open and a head full of dark curls is the first part of him to tumble in, he collapses heavily into the seat, all weighed-down by muscles and morality and shit Murphy doesn’t have in his deck.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Murphy teases, matching his raised-brow gaze.

“What’s up, Murph?” Bellamy asks, voice just as deep and intimidating as Murphy remembers.

The younger man matches his sideways-glued grin, offers, “Picking up your q-tip looking ass. How ‘ya been, guy? Long time no see.”

“Good. I mean, exams, you know...”

“I don’t, I don’t.” Murphy nods, sounding agreeable as he tears his stare back to the blurred window reluctantly. “How’s your sister, man?

He hears Bellamy shift in his seat. “Why?”

“Just checking in.”

“You don’t need to check in, she’s my sister.”

Murphy follows a man walking a schnauzer with his eyes. “Her Facebook photos are fucking insane, you know. I mean, Cancun? How does she-”

“You know, there’s always this moment right before I see you where I’m like, _“Why haven’t I seen Murphy lately? We should hang out more,”_ and then I actually see you and I’m like _“Oh, right.”_ ”

The younger man flings out a pale excuse for an arm and the back of his hand slaps hard against Bellamy’s firm chest with a _‘SLAP’_ that jolts the driver and has him fumbling to recover from a swerve into the other lane.

Murphy snickers. “Isn’t driving your _job_ , man?”

The cabbie pulls over abruptly, shoulders tensed. “Jesus Christ, get out. Just pay and get out here.”

“Sensitive much?” Murphy grumbles, fishing around in his pockets for a couple of crumpled ones that he swore he had, initially. Bellamy looks at him dubiously, an exasperated look already floating next to his head so he can slip it on as soon as the other boy inevitably concludes-

“Fresh out.”

The raven-haired man sighs heavily as Murphy gives him an apologetic grin and stumbles out of the cab, leaving a wet streak of sticky beer-coated fingerprints on the headrest as he goes. Bellamy apologizes to the red-faced cab driver, presses a wrinkled twenty onto the dogbox and hurries after his sad excuse for a friend, who’s already making his way down the sidewalk, raising hands above his head to slap the colorful awnings over shop entrances.

Bellamy watches the world fall away behind them in increments as they go, new eyes in, as if he hadn’t seen anything but lines on notebook paper and history books thicker than Murphy’s skull for months, and mostly he hadn’t. He looks on as fading brick skims past the younger brunet’s ghastly white fingertips, as the fiery autumn trees catch flame in the far distance, as Murphy steps on every crack on the sidewalk with a heavy boot. He’s never stopped trying to break his mother’s back.

Bellamy loves him, he does. Like a brother. He loves Murphy for his paper skin and his shitty attitude, he loves him for the ashtray he carries in his pocket, the lumpy purple one from 7th grade pottery class because he’ll never flick a cigarette butt onto the ground. He loves him for chasing pigeons down the street, loves him for stealing lottery tickets, loves him for always having something negative to say. He loves him for his big mouth and his big ideas and the big rain cloud he carries on a lightning-bolt leash.

He loves him like a brother.

“Nice tie, dork. Putting on airs for me?”

Of course, the reverie never goes un-shattered.

Bellamy jabs a finger at Murphy’s white tee, stained with a streak of red paint and a yellowed beer spill, saying “So me not dressing like I sleep in a dumpster is putting on airs?”

Murphy shrugs, unaffected. “I guess I’m just more confident in my charming personality outweighing my dashing natural appearance than most.” Bellamy just sighs, knowing when to give up with Murphy.

A little blue house comes into sight around the corner, white columns and borders lining the windows and the welcoming front door. “There he is,” Bellamy points, and Murphy tries to line up his sight with Bellamy’s meaty fuckin’ finger.

“Where?”

“The like- the quaint little blue one, right there-”

“Quaint, dude?” Murphy mocks, but Bellamy is smug regardless, seeing as Murphy makes his way to the house anyhow, description effective.

Murphy makes his way ahead of Bellamy, stomping up the front porch steps and slamming his fist against the innocent front door like a police officer, rapping incessantly as Bellamy watches from behind in shameful acquiescence. It opens up cautiously at last, revealing the confusion-warped face of a familiar lanky kid, the one with the suddenly dull eyes and shaved head. “Wha-”

Bellamy can’t help but rush forward, tossing an arm around the guy warmly. “Jasper Jordan!” both of the unwanted guests shout, and the two of them feel like high schoolers again, plowing past Jasper with excitement and tumbling into the house practically on top of one another. Jasper scrambles after them, eyes wide.

“What are you guys doing here?”

Bellamy spins round to clap him on the back. “Cancel your plans, Jasper Jordan. We’re getting you wasted tonight.” Jasper gapes as Bellamy too shoves past, trailing after Murphy as he inspects the halls of Jasper’s new house.

“Guys, no, you need to leave before my uncle-”

“Nice place, man,” Murphy decides, tilting paintings and turning tabletop decor as he makes his way to Jasper’s bedroom, leaving the floundering resident scurrying after him, straightening expensive art and catching elegant vases before they make their final descent to the ground thanks to Murphy’s heavy hand. Bellamy glances at him, slightly apologetically, before following the shorter guy into Jasper’s bedroom anyway.

“You got any weed? I bet it’s stashed in the walls and shit, knowing you-” Murphy pries a mirror way from the wall, peering behind it with narrowed eyes like it’s a warranted search. “In the pillows or something, call it _kushion_ ,” he peeks behind him with a poorly-stifled grin of pride, says “Eh?” when no pity laughs resound. Bellamy shakes his head in resignation, and Murphy crosses his arms with a flourish. “Fuck you guys.”

Jasper wanders warily to the window, pulling the plastic blinds apart and searching for the tell-tale black SUV pulling into the driveway. Murphy pauses his frustrated twisting of a Rubix cube plucked from the bedside table to examine the dark shadows hanging under Jasper’s eyes like he has the black plague, the sudden disappearance of his signature monster, chocolate curls.

Murphy sweeps across the room to shove at Jasper’s shoulder. “It’s your twenty-first birthday, man, you gotta come out.”

“I can’t dude, listen, I have the biggest med school interview ever tomorrow. I just can’t, got it?”

Bellamy tears his eyes away from a photo on the dresser of Jasper and his six-foot under parents, all bright, goofy smiles and tumbling curls. “Murphy’s right, it’s a big day for you kid.”

Murphy points a thumb over his shoulder at Bellamy, as if to say “See? Someone whose opinion you value more than mine agrees.”

“Don’t you want to shove it in the face of every bouncer who has ever turned you away just because you look like a fresh pistachio?” Bellamy offers, well-intentioned. Jasper frowns indignantly, running a hand over his fuzzy head with unease. Murphy snorts, has Bellamy turning on him in mere seconds. “Oh, you can laugh, but they always turned you away too, Pipsqueak. What was it that one bouncer said to you senior year? “Nice try, Dora?””

Murphy smacks the side of Bellamy’s head with a flattened palm, leaving Bellamy firing off a half-hearted punch that clips his shoulder hard enough to send the boy down onto the futon behind him, where he resigns.

Jasper’s eyes glimmer like they used to for an almost undetectable millisecond at his friends’ antics, gaze flickering to a windbreaker hanging on the doorknob.

“Come out, man. You’re twenty-one now. You’re an adult, dude. Your asshole uncle isn’t around anymore,” Murphy tries, when the windbreaker flutters to the floor with a rustle and the polished white door cracks against a dresser, Mr. Jordan stepping in with robotic movements, cold eyes traveling over the three of them.

“Oh, speak of the devil,” Murphy scowls. As he's stretching out over the achingly weed-smelling couch, making himself look permanent, he redirects his gaze to the back of Bellamy’s head who murmurs politely, “Mr. Jordan, how’ve you been?”

“You still owe me $17.50 for that hole in my fence, Mr. Blake.”

“Uh, really? That was from, like, eighth grade, sir.”

Mr. Jordan eyes skitter to Jasper, finding a place to rest on his steely but nerve-wracked face. “I didn’t know you still associated with _these_ people.”

“I didn’t know they were coming, I swear.”

He looks unconvinced. “Your interview with Dr. Griffin is at 8:00 A.M. I’ll pick you up at seven. Be sure your suit is pressed. I called in a lot of favors to set this interview up for you, don’t make me regret it.”

“I won’t,” Jasper promises, voice cold in a way that neither of his friends recognize.

When Lucifer leaves the room, Jasper drops his head into his hands, leaning heavily against the window. “Listen, it was super cool of you guys to try and surprise me, but I really can’t go out. This interview determines my whole life, you know?”

Bellamy nods solemnly, “I get it.”

However, Murphy throws his hands up from an awkward position on the couch, shouts “I don’t! I don’t get it. This isn’t the Jasper Jordan I know.”

Something changes in the lanky kid’s face. “Can we go out tomorrow night instead?”

“No! No, we can’t go out tomorrow night instead, because it won’t be your twenty-first birthday, we can go out today and be awesome friends doing an awesome thing for their lame friend, but we go out tomorrow and we’re just a bunch of alcoholics getting our fucking faces melted off on a Sunday night.” Murphy breathes, finally, leaps up from the folded bed. “Surely you can go out one night. We’ll have you home in time for you to sleep it off, we won’t even get completely wasted!”

Bellamy crosses his arms, ever the angel on the shoulder of the torn. “He said he can’t, Murphy. I know it’s hard for you to grasp this concept, but he has grown-up stuff to do tomorrow, okay? You know, like a real person?”

“First of all, Bellamy, you need to shut the fuck up. And Jasper Jordan, you need to sit down,” Jasper stiffens as Murphy wrestles him with a rough hand from the window to the couch. “Come on, just take a seat, please, on your nice futon here, because you have a shit attitude right now, my friend, okay?” Murphy shoves him down with more force than necessary, backing up to drop his backpack onto the floor and close his eyes, stretching his arms out like Christ on the cross. “Jasper Jordan, this is not any birthday.”

“Here he goes,” Bellamy grumbles, eyes rolling in their sockets.

“This is your twenty-first birthday. This is the day you become a man. This is the day you get to tell every bouncer that has ever carded you “You know what? I get it. I look like Cailou-”

“What the fuck?”

“-But today is my twenty-first birthday, so step aside and let a man come through,” he finishes, lowering his arms and looking Jasper in the eye with the intensity of a dying man.

“I get it, Murphy. You really want an excuse to get embarrassingly wasted and make out with guys.”

Murphy scoffs, eyes rolling indignantly as Bellamy blushes behind him and crosses his freckled arms tighter.

“But I just can’t come out. Capisce?”

Murphy heaves his bookbag onto his shoulders again. “Whatever. I’m taking you out whether you like it or not. I don’t care if you’re scared of your dickwad fucking uncle.”

Bellamy pipes up from behind with, “We’re all scared of his uncle.”

“I’m not!” The freckled man looks at him, skepticism evident. “Okay, a little bit. But it doesn’t matter! If you don’t come out with us, I’m gonna stand outside all night and throw rocks at your window,” he warns, and Bellamy’s brows crinkle together.

“Sounds more romantic than threatening-”

Murphy plunges a hand into the fishbowl behind him, scooping a sea green pebble from the bottom and windmilling it into the window where it makes contact with a _‘CRACK’_ and the glass spiderwebs out around it.

Jasper stumbles to the window with a disbelieving stare. “Don’t break my fucking windows, you fucking animal!” He spins on a heel, shouts “Alright! Alright! Fine! I’ll come out! What kind of asshole-” the scream fades into a murmur as he traces the wounded glass with a finger.

“See? Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Murphy crows, making his way for the door.

Jasper grumbles. “Just one. One beer.”

Murphy nods, meeting Bellamy’s uneasy smile with wide eyes. “Just one. That’s all I wanted.”

“I mean it. Just one. That’s _all._ ” Jasper narrows his eyes, a warning finger held in the air.

Murphy’s lips stretch into a grin. “Just one.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just one, he said. it'll be fun, he said.


	2. memories tend to just pop up

So, he had one.

And then another.

And then a few more.

And then a lot.

“Give me a shot!” Jasper screams, music pulsating through the three of them like an electrocution, maybe an execution. Bellamy can’t think like this, beams of yellow and violet crisscrossing over them in hatches and flashes, Murphy’s sweaty skin all over him as the brunet jumps to the pounding hip-hop music, whiskey leaping from his glass in big, expensive teardrops as he stores his little brain away in his wallet for the night.

“I’m gonna be twenty-one forever, motherfuckers!” the pre-med student with the interview at 8:00 A.M. cries, shirt soaked in tequila and upside-down fireball shots that were, tragically, just a few inches off.

Bellamy looks warily at his partner in crime, but Murphy’s head is tilted back in a frozen laugh, his eyes squinted closed against the lights of the bar. Bellamy’s gaze lingers until a body falls heavily into him, an absolutely plastered Jasper leaning on him for support. “Dude, you good?”

“I’m gooder than good, bro. I’m-” he trails off, holds the pad of his finger against a freckle on Bellamy’s collarbone and keeps it there, like an ant under a glass. Murphy leans into his line of vision with a bright grin.

“It’s awesome to see you guys, honestly. Like, no homo, or anything,” Murphy murmurs peacefully, clearly wasted as well, and Bellamy’s just drunk enough himself to appreciate his friends and their glowing eyes, just drunk enough to not shy away from Murphy’s perpetual ramen-beer breath.

“Give me a hug, dude-” proclaims Jasper, bumbling slightly to the left to throw loose limbs around Murphy like a blanket, hanging over the infamously untouchable skeleton-man like he has a death wish.

But, again, Murphy is pretty wasted.

Bellamy’s eyes crinkle in a soft-hearted grin that distorts his whole face, a rare one, when Murphy eases into the hug and laughs tightly, an improvement.

“You sure you’re okay, though?” Bellamy offers again, and Jasper slaps his hovering hands away with two sticky palms.

“Look at me, Bellamy.” There’s half a lime wedge on his shoulder and a glistening slick of something streaked across his forehead. He’s drooling. “I’m fine!”

“You look fine.”

“He’s fine!” Murphy concurs, looping an arm around Bellamy’s bicep and swinging it a few times, beaming up at him like a child. Bellamy eases into it, maybe loosening up to give the swinging a little more momentum, but not if you asked him. He looks around the place with the cheering crowds and smothering music, body shots off of a man in a cowboy hat happening somewhere to the right of him, and something clicks.

“You know what this place reminds me of?”

Murphy plops his chin down on Bellamy’s shoulder, looking up at him from underneath his lashes in a way that only makes Bellamy’s stomach stir a little violently. “What?”

“That night we won Wallace’s beer pong tournament and Jasper Jordan hooked up with that chick who played the banjo.”

“Oh, yeah! What was her name?”

“Maya?”

“Maya!”

Murphy snorts. “Yeah, her Cotton-Eye Joe rendition was admittedly magical.”

Bellamy blinks to Jasper with a grin, asks “Speaking of the banjo, you know of any new music?”

Jasper pouts, looking somewhere past them. “Dude, I’m pre-med, man. I don’t listen to music. I can’t even remember the last time I went to a show.”

“Fuck, man,” Bellamy sympathizes, when Murphy’s head flies up from Bellamy’s shoulder and only slams into the victim’s jaw hard enough on the way up to make an audible cracking noise.

“You’re still in for The Four Horsemen at Dead Zone this summer, right?” he practically pleads. Jasper beams.

“Hell yeah! Dead Zone!”

“Right! Okay! Dead Zone!” Murphy crows back, like some kind of occult chant is happening, when he suddenly turns to Bellamy with a dreadfully hopeful look.

“Bellamy, what about you man?”

“Hm?” He pretends to not have heard the question, praying he’ll drop it.

“Dead Zone, The Four Horsemen?” The brunet persists.

Bellamy scratches his neck, casts his gaze to the grimy floor littered with peanut shells and lime skins. “I don't know, Murph. Aren't we too old to be doing the whole music festival thing?”

Murphy balks at him. “Uh, I don’t know, Bellamy. Are we too old to have fun times?” he argues, turning his palms out and waving his arms as if he’s displaying some sort of evidence of 'fun times.' “Are we too old to spend a week enjoying two-hundred and fifty bands play the seminal music of our generation? Too old to drop acid and make love to white chicks in dreadlocks?”

Jasper holds up a finger. “I don’t like white chicks in dreadlocks.”

Murphy jabs an index finger at Bellamy’s chest. “He does!”

Bellamy’s nose scrunches up involuntarily as he flicks the offending hand away. “It was one time!”

Murphy shrugs him off, plundering on. “Are we too old to take handfuls of Ecstasy from old bald men named Thelonius and dance around in fur with other people in fur? Remember _Roan?”_

“Yeah, we are too old for all of those things that you just said, yeah,” Bellamy decides, returning to nursing his beer with a frown.

“I don’t like white chicks in dreadlocks,” Jasper reiterates, slightly louder this time. Murphy assumes the Ecstasy, acid and furs are otherwise stamped Jasper-approved.

“We all graduate in May, right?” Murphy is near begging at this point, fists clutching the fronts of the other two men’s shirts. “This could be the last summer all three of us ever spend together!”

“Thank god,” Bellamy murmurs, receiving a slap on the back of his head, rightfully. “Anyway, I have a job lined up, I’d rather not lose it because of your tweets about us dropping acid in Arizona.”

“What?!" Murphy exclaims, shoving Bellamy away from him with both palms, then stepping into his space once again. “You got a fucking _job?”_

“Yeah,” he says, and he knows he may as well be stabbing Murphy in the stomach with a fork under a dinner table. “Ark College in Virginia.”

“Dude, congrats!” Jasper cries out, but Bellamy can’t tear his eyes away from Murphy’s mouth hanging open in disbelief, the wounded look on his face. “That’s a great school!”

“Thanks, Jasper Jordan,” he says, weakly, and meets Murphy’s eyes. “See?”

“What about-” Bellamy’s stomach turns as a list of “what about”’s runs through his head in a reel, click click click clicking. “-The Four Horsemen at Dead Zone, Bellamy?”

It’s the last thing either of them care about right now, and yet it still breaks his heart a little.

“I’ll think about it, alright?”

“Yeah,” Murphy grumbles, rolling his eyes as he turns to the bar to clasp his hands around his nearly forgotten glass, shallow with mostly-spilled whiskey. “That’s bullshit.”

“Jasper! Hey!” someone shouts, and the foul-smelling crowd near them parts with the prying of two pale, persistent elbows. The tiny blonde who emerges is definitely no Moses.

"Oh, just give up immediately," Murphy whispers at the sight of her, peering up at Bellamy with a quirked brow. Bellamy jams his thumb between two of his ribs without taking his eyes from her, drawing out a surprised yelp from the brunet.

“Clark-ie!” Jasper crows, wrapping the woman in a tight hug before pointing an index finger at the two bewildered men before them.

“This is Bellamy and Murphy, from high school. Bellamy and Murphy, this is Clarke from pre-med."

Bellamy steps up to the girl-- streaks of pink running softly through familiar golden hair, thin lips stretched in a polite smile that he's admittedly drawn to-- and extends a hand. “Nice to meet you, Clarke."

Clarke is nearly lifted off the ground with the power of Bellamy’s handshake, looking flustered when the taller man pulls away awkwardly. “That’s-” she stretches her arm out, winding it around, “-quite a firm shake you got there.”

“Yeah,” Murphy interjects, elbowing Bellamy in the ribs. “’Cause he masturbates a lot.”

Clarke blinks a few times, torn between looking startled and amused, and Bellamy sighs, shoving a snickering Murphy behind him. “I’m so sorry about him. God, we don't even know you, that's so- just- pretend he isn’t here.”

“She’s picking up what I’m putting down. We’re hitting it off, Bellamy,” Murphy argues from over his shoulder, and Clarke blinks again, at a loss for words.

“If she is, yeah, then she’s putting it down again. Look at her, you’ve made her uncomfortable,” Bellamy protests, aiming the neck of his beer bottle at an unsuspecting Clarke.

“But then she picks it back up.”

“I feel like she wouldn’t pick it up once, honestly.”

“Oh-” Murphy groans, slamming his glass down on the bar, glass clinking dangerously with another patron’s. “That’s it. Fuck you. I’m going to play darts, hesitate to follow.” He storms off toward a dark corner of the bar, patting Clarke’s shoulder as he ghosts by. “Enjoy your boring life with my boring friend Bellamy who played the trombone in band.”

“Okay, thanks pal, enjoy your darts,” Bellamy interjects, ushering him along with a shove toward the wafts of smoke and sounds of a dartboard being abused by drunkards. Jasper, surprisingly, bumbles after him, leaving Bellamy looking uncomfortably from the syrupy bottle in his hand and the startled girl shifting on her feet a yard away.

“Uh, here, sit down,” Bellamy tries, sliding out a bar stool for himself and another for Clarke.

He peers innocently at the front of her hoodie, tries to decipher the sorority name embroidered neatly across the front. "Sigma... Zeta... circle with a line through it?"

"Theta. Not a frat guy, I'm guessing?"

Bellamy shakes his head a little, "No, I'm not angry and secretly gay." Clarke looks warily over her shoulder at Murphy as he shouts "Move, cow!" at someone on the dance floor, shoving forward toward the general area of darts with Jasper cowering behind him. Bellamy barks out a startled laugh at the insinuation.

“So- that’s your best friend?”

Bellamy shrugs, lingering smile fading. Brother. “I guess. I mean- we were close in high school, but we don’t talk much anymore.”

“Your oldest friends are always your weirdest friends, right?”

Bellamy grins into his glass, a movie reeling through his head of Murphy’s antics and schemes, laughs and fights and stealing matching red belts from a department store with mall cops on their heels, tearing up the carpet in his bedroom over a game of checkers, intertwined fingers at his father’s funeral.

“People change when they go to college,” Clarke adds. Bellamy disagrees. “Like I’m sure he wasn’t that big of an asshole back in high school.”

_A framed picture of Murphy in a bandanna for his birthday every year, two oranges in his hoodie pockets almost always, one for him and one for Bellamy, his fist dislocating Bellamy’s jaw in the school parking lot, cracks in the sidewalk, cracks in the sidewalk, cracks in the sidewalk, cracks in the sidewalk._

“No, hundred percent same amount of asshole.”  


*******

“Murphy, if I’m being honest, I’m really glad you made me come out tonight.”

Jasper sticks another dart in the green, looking near collapse but still radiant.

“No problem. I’m sorry Bellamy’s being such a dick, though.” Murphy lands a second bulls-eye, even with a thick, sweaty strand of hair fluttering in front of his eyes.

Jasper watches with reverence, despite donning his Team Bellamy t-shirt. “He’s not being a dick.”

“He is, actually. It’s like, he thinks he’s too cool or too smart for us. But it’s like, “You’re a nerd, dude.”” Murphy clenches a fist and his jaw shifts, he sends another dart flying with frightening strength and accuracy.

“Where did you learn to throw darts like this?”

Murphy looks tiredly at the blue flight of a dart in his hand, runs a finger over the sharp steel point.

_A man with a head of inky curls and honey-smooth skin holds his wrist, places a feather-light touch over his left eye to keep it closed. They’ve printed out the mugshot of the officer who shot Alex Murphy, pinned it to the dartboard in Bellamy’s bedroom. The freckled boy claps his hands together and laughs when the shorter brunet lands one right in the murderer’s little papery pupil, and Murphy can’t help but think he must be the **sun.**_

“You wouldn’t know him.”

Jasper shrugs. “Anyway, look, I can tell you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset?” Murphy says it like a question, firing another at the board, but he’s off his game now. It lands with a _‘clack’_ on the edge and tumbles to the floor.

As he’s bent over to retrieve it, squished stomach full of cinnamon whiskey protesting the pressure angrily, Jasper keeps on pushing, nearing black-out drunk and all. “He’s changed and you’re upset by it. He’s growing out of you and your weird stuff and it makes you mad.”

“Can you fuck off with psychoanalysis, Pre-med? I’m not upset. I don’t care what Bellamy does,” Murphy says, and if he almost manages to make it sound truthful, it drains him.

“I’m gonna go talk to him,” Jasper slurs, plucking a dart out of Murphy’s hand.

“Don’t do that-” Murphy protests, and Jasper shoves him away, lining up a final shot.

“Dude, don’t talk to him!” Murphy insists, giving him a push with perfect timing, and if someone had told them Satan was the one who twisted Jasper’s arm and gave him a boost strong enough to send the dart flying into another bar patron’s cheek, Murphy’d believe it.

“Fuck!” the pale man around the corner yelps, yanking the steel tip from the side of his face with a twisted expression.

Jasper’s left gaping after his own destruction, waddles up with a slurred, “Oh my god! Oh my god, man! I’m so sorry! Seriously, I’m so sorry! Let me take a look, I’m pre-med, I’ll just check-”

“Back off, man!” shouts the poor asshole with a hole in his cheek, blood trickling down to his jawline, punctuates it with a shove.

“Take a step back, big fella,” Murphy rumbles as he approaches, ever the defender.

“You looking for a fight?” the patron asks with a tilt of his chin, and Murphy snorts.

“Nobody wants to dance, pretty boy. It was an accident.”

“Oh, an accident. You know, the hole in my face doesn’t even hurt anymore, now that I know it was an accident.”

“Calm down, man,” Murphy tries again, confidence wavering as the man comes closer.

“Get ‘em, Finn!” a fangirl to the left cheers excitedly, a newly formed crowd rumbling as the clearly drunk ‘Finn’ curls his fingers around the edge of a bar stool.

“Just so you know-"

Jasper looks up at Murphy warily, a bead of sweat trailing down his nearly-bald head. “What’s happening?”

“-this is an accident too.”

The bar stool is launched from the man’s grasp like the fucking North American X-15, clattering against the wall behind them as Murphy ducks and rips a wide-eyed Jasper to the floor with him.

“Jesus Christ, man! Are you okay?!” Murphy spits, stumbling back to his full height and leaning on a pool table to steady himself.

“If I ever see you two again, I will rip your faces off, and then sew them back on, except you’ll get his and he’ll get yours” the man warns, bringing a thumb to the puncture wound in his cheek.

Murphy stifles a frightened laugh, biting his lip harshly as he ushers a horrified Jasper out of the danger zone, inspecting his trousers for piss as they rush through the thinning crowd. “Let’s fucking go!” Murphy screams in Bellamy’s ear at the bar, gripping him by the bicep and tearing him away from Clarke, who shrinks away from Murphy’s shouts and grasping hands. Bellamy shoots her a frightened smile and a shrug as the brunet clutching onto his arm drags him away and out into the biting night.

“What could have possibly happened that you had to make an exit of those proportions and drag me away from her?”

“Dude, show some respect for your veterans, okay? We could’ve fucking died back there.”

“I-” Bellamy sighs. “I don’t know even wanna know.”

Murphy spits at the concrete. "Plus, you never would've closed."

"I was too!"

"Nah, man. She was a ten and _you_ are a soft eight," Murphy scuffs the ground with his shoe, face flickering through an apparent emotion option menu.

"Soft eight? Who are you to talk, hard three?"

Murphy shrugs, apparently confident in his ability to own the battered vanilla pudding-cup look.

“Okay, where are we going now?” Jasper chimes in, rubbing his hands together as he leans heavily on Murphy.

“Oh, dude, anywhere. This is the Bar-muda Triangle.”

“No, man, we have to get Jasper Jordan home. His uncle is gonna fucking kill him, and then us,” Bellamy argues, approaching to tear Jasper from Murphy’s shoulder, who shoves him back with a hand on his chest.

“Been there, done that, Pissbaby.”

Jasper chuckles excitedly. “ _”Pissbaby.”_ That’s awesome. Pissbaby!”

Bellamy frowns. “How many shots did he have?”

Murphy shrugs, counting on his fingers for a moment, starting over. He tries again, gets to five, starts over. “Dude, it doesn’t matter. You know he can drink us both under the table.”

Jasper blinks up at a neon sign flickering across the street. “Oh, shit. Alie’s. This place has been carding me for years.” Revenge darkens his eyes as he makes his away across the road, ignoring a passing car as he stumbles through, and Bellamy can’t help but imagine him as Frogger, a Jasper Jordan-splatter in a pixel street.

“Where is he going?!” Murphy shouts over the incessant honking of a braked cab and a swerving Civic as their friend stumbles through traffic to reach the pretty red lights.

“Alie’s, he just said that.”

“I meant- whatever. Let’s go,” Murphy perks up, walking ahead and glancing nervously over his shoulder when he doesn’t feel Bellamy’s hesitant shadow at his back.

“One more bar, dude, and then we’ll go home.”

“One more?”

“One more,” Murphy promises, and Bellamy sighs as the whiskey-breathed dumbass-- painted vividly and sweetly by the flickering colors of the nightlife and a splash of oncoming headlights-- loops his arm around the other’s again, drags him across the street and breaks into a sprint to beat the eighteen-wheeler barreling forward.

One more.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is some trash im laughing, anyway this fic is gonna start veering away from the plot after this chapter bc there is some territory that the movie ventures into that i just cannot bear to step foot in lmao


	3. bar to bar at the speed of sound

 

So, they went to one more bar.

And then another.

And then a few more.

And then... well.

The night passes by in flashes of Murphy’s teeth against dull white lights, Bellamy’s tongue along the grain of a beer-coated table in a dare gone wrong, Jasper’s drivers license kissed with spit and glued to his forehead as they brush their way past towering, tattooed bouncers into another velvet-carpeted club that wills them away.

Under the crimson glow and bourbon fog of Alie’s, there is space. There is Bellamy, adjusting his collar with dark hands and a grimace as Jasper whoops and hollers in the haze somewhere behind them. There is Murphy, trying to avert his eyes and pocket his frustrations when the head of curls to his left trades their drinks without asking, sips away at another boring beer for a boring, employed, was-never-fun-at-Deadzone-anyway Bellamy Blake. Murphy watches ash trail behind his fingers as he taps across the bar and back again, into Murphy’s reach, into Murphy’s space, hoping for something without the fucking balls to ask.

Murphy’s fingers do not tap back. There is miles between them, (he sees the two of them running from each other in the light brown splits in the bar-top.) There is space.

And in the cigarette smoke, pulsing clover green with the flashy lights from every sad corner of a dirty Irish pub conveniently called _Murphy’s_ , there is less space, yet an excess of it. Jasper slaps his I.D. against the face of a grumbling doorman, screams _“Blackjack, motherfucker!”_ and bulldozes in, Bellamy tumbling apologetically after him and Murphy graciously expressing his appreciation that they’ve named a bar after him as they order another round. The jokes get old after the fifth one, but Bellamy grins and plants two huge thumbs above Murphy’s upper lip to weave a mustache of fingers, mutters something like _“Quite a jolly good pub ye got yerself ‘ere mate-y,”_ and Murphy clutches his wrists and sways happily into him, plants his own thumb over Bellamy’s eye and whispers that he sounds more like a pirate than an Irishman, whispers it like he’s telling a very grand secret.

Jasper wails in the white noise, pants to his ankles and a blindingly pale, whole ass on display. Murphy barrels past a dark-cheeked Bellamy with a boisterous laugh to haul their shitfaced friend off of a table as the small crowd cheers, and Bellamy clambers unceremoniously after him to yank poor Jasper’s trousers back up to his waist. To watch carefully and dizzily as Murphy’s nimble fingers buckle Jasper’s belt quickly and bunch in the fabric of his shirt to drag him out of the scene he’s made, brushing past Bellamy and leaving an unwarranted trail of shivers climbing like ivy up freckled arms. To follow the two devils on his broad shoulders to another forbidden bar.

And there is less space (but still enough to make Bellamy feel sick.)

Then they’re in a room on fire, orange pooling in the cupid bow of Murphy’s lips and the hollows of Bellamy’s cheeks as he twirls his tongue unabashedly around the straw of something fruity that Jasper insisted he try. There are ropes and rusty old farm tools clinging to the walls, a thriving cactus plant on either side of him. If he looks to Murphy, there is a bull skull floating above his head, trapped in the wall like it’d meant to plow through but gotten stuck and died there. Bellamy thinks he understands the dead bull, as the pale boy who he’d meant to keep as strictly a blood brother plucks the straw from his drink and takes a sip, and Bellamy thinks to make fun of him but gets hung on the realization that his mouth might taste like apples now.

Jasper chants a series of _“Yeehaw!”_ s on the mechanical bull-- Murphy fires him a thumbs up and Bellamy claps his hands together and laughs, despite his head spinning somewhere sinister and traitorous.

Then Jasper Jordan is vomiting on the mechanical bull and they’ve been asked to leave, and Murphy is croaking out “Make way for the rodeo clown!” between heaving breaths of amusement from behind Bellamy as he carries Jasper to the back door alone, the other cackling uselessly in the thick of the fire as they clamber out.

Bellamy needs space.

“They’re gonna need a new bull,” Murphy snickers again as Bellamy drops Jasper gently onto a street bench and kicks a discarded can into the road, muttering “Not funny.”

It’s a little funny.

“If we don’t get Jasper Jordan to that interview his uncle is gonna kill him, and then us. And we’ll probably all have to share a grave because he’s a selfish bastard and won’t dig more than one, and I don’t want to be buried with you, man.”

Murphy collapses onto the bench and scoops a barely-conscious Jasper into his arms with a grin. “We could bone, dude.”

Bellamy’s face bursts with heat and darkens at that, and Murphy laughs to himself, looking up again with wine-tinted cheeks and a curled lip. “Bone. ‘Cause skeletons? God, I’m- I could do this shit for a living.”

The dark-haired man bristles, throws up his hands. “I’m serious, Murphy! We have to...” The empty street is wet with forgotten rain and a stray dog trots by like a ghost, and they could be in another dimension for all Bellamy knows. “Where are we?”

Murphy looks left, right, forward, down. Jasper blinks sleepily, head tossing in Murphy’s lap. “Jasper Jordan, dude, where do you live?”

“Your ass,” Jasper slurs angrily, and Bellamy quirks an eyebrow in surprise.

“That says more about you than me, pal,” Murphy murmurs, slapping his cheek with a flattened palm. “Okay, hey, tell us where your house is located, then. Your living establishment.”

Bellamy crouches down as the only response Jasper can offer is a lolling head, pleads softly, “Where’s your address, buddy? We can get you home and rested, fix you up a cup of coffee before your interview, just tell us your address, man.”

“Dude, that’s not gonna work. You have to shake him,” Murphy corrects and tangles his hands in Jasper’s shirt before Bellamy can stop him, rattles him like a maraca. “I know you’re in there! I know you can hear me!”

Bellamy slaps his hands away and looks up with a scrunched face of disapproval, and Murphy drops Jasper in his seat and bumbles to a stand. “Don’t you know where it is? How did we get there the first time?”

“It was on like- a slip of paper. I left it at his house,” Bellamy concedes, glancing away from the eerily silent road apologetically. Murphy slaps him roughly on the arm, tilts his face to the sky with a hot breath that seeps out into the night chill as a thin wisp of fog. “Should we call his uncle?”

Murphy looks at him incredulously, thick eyebrows shooting in every direction. “Yeah, let’s call him. _“Uhh, Dr. Jordan, scariest man alive, hey, it’s your nephew’s trashy high school friends, we took him out to get shitfaced and fucked up his future and now we’re in a back alley in fucking Timbuktu, swing by and pick us up?”_ he all but spits, and Bellamy shoves harshly at his shoulder, thinking hard.

“Wait. Oh my God. Clarke!”

“Oh,” Murphy grumbles, thumping his head against the brick wall behind them. “Stop thinking with your dick and give me a good idea, please?”

“No, no. Listen, she’s friends with Jasper. She might know where he lives, dude.”

Murphy perks up. “Okay, okay that’s good, pea brain. Did you get her number?”

“No, because-”

He cocks his head. “Because you’re a soft eight and couldn’t close?”

Bellamy practically snarls. “No, asshole. Because I’m a hard nine and was about to close but you interrupted me.”

Murphy shrugs. “You weren’t gonna close. She was closeable. I could’ve closed. Hell, Jasper Jordan could’ve closed,” he punctuates the theory with a waving gesture to Jasper, slumped over and drooling onto the bench. Bellamy rolls his eyes and bends to gather the poor sack of booze into his arms.

“Clarke lives in a sorority. If we can find her house, we could find her.”

“No way, dude. There are thousands of people on this campus. No way am I marching around with you dumbasses looking for one person who may or may not know where Jasper Jordan lives. No, not happening.”

Bellamy pauses, glances over his shoulder at his friend, the boy’s arms crossed as he presses himself into the corner of the brick building, pulsating warmly with country music and muffled voices. He eases Jasper onto the vibrant gum-decorated bench again, closes in on Murphy, who shrinks away.

“Please, just trust me.”

They’re in the blue, blue street painted by melting streams of a crescent moon and fizzed out streetlights, Murphy’s breath is coming out in white clouds, little hot puffs against Bellamy’s face as he nears, and he can see when it quickens, gets erratic.

He looks like an ivory statue there, trying to keep his chin up as Bellamy plants his hands softly over his strong, marble shoulders, ten bottles of brave firing an electric buzz of courage through him as he blocks Murphy’s vision with dark eyes and moon-touched everything.

“And to think-” he murmurs, harmless and warm, “-you call me the boring one.”

Murphy’s fearful coloring book face rips into a cocky smile as he peels away from the wall and pushes his forearms against an unmoving chest. Some bricks and a hard place. Bellamy’s admittedly always been his rock anyways. “Pick your adventures, Professor,” he breathes, eyes fluttering dangerously and Bellamy has to pull away from the glinting blade tracing stars over his heart before it kills him.

“Let’s get moving,” he sighs, and Murphy’s swaying on his feet with a clenched jaw and a lightning storm in his eyes. And God, Bellamy wishes he could entertain him.

But he’s a vacuum in the cosmos, and Bellamy needs some fucking space. He’s his brother, after all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this got prose-ier and angstier than i had originally planned but dont all of my fics
> 
> i miss jasper this was so hard to write im sad


	4. im a scholar and a gentleman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: this chapter contains a brief period of like, introspective internalized homophobia (equating male homosexuality to femininity are not my personal views of course just how i chose to depict what modern au bellamy grew up thinking. at no fault of his family or anything just, societal reasons) anyway if you would like to skip this part it begins at "he means to think about it, he means to chew on the image" and ends at "little help here"

The buildings come into view past the fog of dusk around the same time that Murphy has finally calculated how to control his breathing under the weight of a barely conscious Jasper, strung between him and Bellamy as they plunder onward towards Alpha Beta Chi Delta Epsilon Phi Gamma and the rest of the alphabet. Half of the front yards are spotted with dying fairy lights and red solo cups, the other half neatly-trimmed, prim and proper and sprinkled with hydrangeas.

“Dude, why are you breathing so hard?”

“Shut the fuck up, man. I have asthma,” Murphy snarls, only interrupted by a single fluttering wheeze that makes the entirety of his bite a little less threatening. Bellamy chuckles, and a growl bubbles up in Murphy as he imagines the rippling muscles and tan skin blinking droplets of sweat coming to life underneath that ugly fucking blazer.

It certainly does not help to calm the- uh- asthma.

“I didn’t sign up for- _uh-_ ” he grunts, “-a dog-walk. I’ve been skipping leg day.”

Another streetlight like a chatty firefly seems to be clicking at him from across the rainy street, sucking its teeth at the news of another lie. Bellamy casts a playful glance his way, still marching on, undeterred. “Your skinny little chicken legs have never stepped inside of a gym. The only exercise you’ve ever gotten is kicking the shit out of me over checkers or darts.” A beat. “You’re welcome.”

Murphy pushes down the laugh threatening to fall from his lips, stuffs in the furthest corner of his cheek like a wad of cotton. “Sorry about the rib.” Bellamy’s eyes glint under the moon silk, as if he hadn’t expected Murphy to remember their troubled-waters past as vividly as he does.

“Sorry about your poor sportsmanship.”

Jasper falls like an anvil to the glazed cobblestone as Murphy jumps across the clothing line to smack Bellamy on the neck, who barks out a startled giggle, girlish and something anyone else would’ve crucified him for. But Murphy-- familiar, familiar Murphy-- blurts out the cotton at last, a contagious series of rasping, breathy laughs as they stare at each other wide-eyed and bright, like kids. Bellamy snatches him into a loose headlock, rubbing rough knuckles into the other boy’s scalp as if he were trying to light his grimy hair on fire. The shorter brunet stifles a hysterical shriek and taps out, palm slapping loudly and frantically on freckled skin.

As Bellamy releases him and Murphy drifts away again, breathy little laughs following his parted lips as he goes, Bellamy’s arms are alight with that suddenly common feeling of shivering ivy leaves, winding around his tendons and fluttering as he watches Murphy tuck a tuft of displaced, too-long hair behind a round ear. As he watches that cold little smile that would look positively sinister on anyone else outshine the- the-... the _everything._

He means to think about it, he means to chew on the image, the feeling, but something about it feels wrong. Sinful, not in the way that he is a believer, but shameful only in that it is unfamiliar, it is... a word that encapsulates him now. A word that was branded onto him before he could read it. Take care of your widowed? abandoned? abandoning? mother.. your fatherless sister. Be strong for them. Be strong.

_Be a man._

But looking at Murphy, puffing out icy little snowstorms as he laughs, oblivious-- attempting to heave a crumpled, forgotten Jasper from the road full of little weaving streams-- Bellamy wishes to be anything else.

“Little- _ugh-_ help here, Hulkie.”

Muscular guy in the smart green blazer. Strong, intelligent. That should be enough for him, enough for the eyes he catches from across a room. It should be.

Bellamy shakes himself out of it, kicks back into gear, shakes off the feeling of too many flower petals, of drowning, the image of jars full of gray eyes seeing nothing, of two hearts and both of them sitting in the pit of his stomach instead of where they belong.

“Let’s- yeah- up,” he bumbles, tongue knotted expertly as he heaves the gangly boy up and Murphy scurries underneath a limp arm from the other side, taking his third of the weight. Bellamy lets him believe it’s half.

“Sigma Pita was it?” Murphy grunts out with a strangled breath, and Bellamy thinks to let him take a nap. ER bills are- bills.

“Pita is bread. Sigma...” Fuck. “Fuck.”

“What?”

“I don’t know-”

Murphy whimpers. Honest to god whimpers. “Are you fucking old? Are you fucking old, Bellamy Blake? First our best friend’s address, now the three letter house name slapped across the poor girl’s _rack--_ ”

“I was more interested in what she had to say--”

“-are you an old fucking man, for real?” Murphy pinches the bridge of his nose, cheeks reddening up to his temples as he tilts his sweat-beaded face towards the sky.

“Are you genuinely asking or are you being a dick because-”

“I’m genuinely asking how your fucking Alzheimer’s is treating you, you old, old fucking man.” Bellamy gapes.

Jasper drops like a sack of potatoes.

“What, so we go knocking on the sorority houses that start with Sigma? That’s- we just ask if there’s a Clarke present and if they say no we move on, it shouldn’t be- there’s not too many-”

“Or, consider this: we leave him here, call animal control, and I go home to my sweet little pullout couch and sleep off this hangover like it’s my job.”

“Ignoring your blatant lack of morals, you work at the Kangaroo on Finch Street, sleeping is already your job.”

“Well, your highness, sorry not all of us can be fancy-schmancy history professors at fancy-schmancy colleges in faraway lands.”

“Oh, you’re still on this?” Bellamy snaps without meaning to, and Murphy’s eyes drop, burning with that grayish blur of fog that takes all the life out of his steely face-- and the older man feels like the Grim Reaper just for raising his voice.

“I’m sorry. I-” A breath that’s far too troubled, too much for situations like this. Situations that only John Murphy can make into a fiasco, a funeral. “I have to do things for me. Real life, adulthood... it isn’t smoking joints at Dead Zone, isn’t melting your face off on a Saturday night with a sheltered pre-med student and a kid from high school.”

Murphy blinks, laughs a wet laugh. “A kid from high school?”

No. No, he hadn’t- he hadn’t meant to-... “Murphy-”

John Murphy, skeleton with no headstone, won’t cry. Not for him. Not over this. “Just- stop. Okay? We’ll find your goddamned sorority chick and get Jasper Jordan home and then you’ll never have to see another stupid kid from high school ever again, sound good?”

The hearts in Bellamy’s stomach, deep and low, must finally realize they’ve been bloodless for a very long time.

*******

“Sigma,” Bellamy murmurs, juts his chin out at the house down the road, brimming over with flashy lights and multicolored streamers, twinkly pop music and bustling bodies covered in luminescent paint spilling from the doorway. Murphy pulls silently ahead, breathing, walking, existing quieter than the other man’s ever heard him. Like maybe if he makes himself small enough, silent enough, he’ll disappear.

They approach the little sorority house bursting with life, with neat white siding and Greek letters spattered unevenly with spotty hot pink paint. Bellamy thinks to blurt out a joke about the Greeks being artists, knows Murphy would force out a laugh at the vague, lackluster history reference if it were any other point in the history of the universe. His luck, really, that he thinks of one now.

Murphy elbows his way through, perhaps like Moses, now, but maybe just an angry kid in a sea of drunk college students. Not everything about him is Biblical.

Not everything about him is magnificent.

(A streetlight flickers out somewhere, perhaps in Arizona. Virginia. Across the street. The power lines can hardly deliver that lie without bursting at the seams.)

“Clarke, do you know a Clarke?”

“Is there a Clarke here? A girl, small blonde, Clarke?”

“A bit of pink hair, pre-med, Clarke? Into trombone players?”

Bellamy glares.

“Clarke? Anyone?”

A girl in red leather and a dash of green paint swiped across her forehead and trailing into her ponytail sidles up to Bellamy, red cup crinkling in the vise-like grip she has on it, like her shitty watered down beer might fly away if she isn’t extra careful. Piles and piles of darker, green plastic-beaded necklaces loop around her neck and wrists. “ _The Commander_ knows everybody.”

“The- what? We don’t have time for this weird sorority bullshit, Bellamy-”

“Hang on.” He holds out a hand which only serves to piss Murphy off more, cheeks burning red in the worst way as he huffs a disgruntled sigh into Jasper’s sleeping face. “Who’s the Commander?”

“You’ll have to travel the Tower, complete the Conclave.”

“I don’t know what any of these words mean,” Murphy blurts, and Bellamy nods in agreement, shrugging towards the woman, who snickers and lassos a hideous green necklace of dollar store beads around each of their necks.

“Travel the Tower, complete the Conclave, ask the Commander about your friend. Have a good time, I'm supposed to say,” she instructs, ushering them towards the stairs. Murphy gives Bellamy a look of confusion glinted with a childlike curiosity. It’s a recipe that suits him.

“Can you hand our friend off here to someone trustworthy, please? He’s- he’s out, so-” Bellamy tries, pushing Jasper towards the girl of a thousand beads, and she shrugs, heaving the limp body to the couch across the foyer with surprising strength and dropping Jasper between two giggling stoners in the designated stoner enclosure, thick smoke wafting out of the dim corner like billowing storm clouds.

Bellamy looks down into the room, wary, shifting his eyes to a suddenly giddy Murphy. “I don’t know if-”

“Dude, he’ll fit right in. Let’s go.”

Murphy takes off up the stairs with bounding steps, heavy black boots plundering through shallow, golden puddles of spilled drinks and- is that milk?

“Murphy, I’m not so sure-”

“Pick your adventures, Professor!” a disembodied voice calls from around the corner, as if nothing had changed since they’d been laced together by the bricks of a cowboy bar, all warm breaths and eyes glowing orange under streetlamps that had only known honesty.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhuhu i dont like this chapter im sorry this one sucked. the next one'll be more fun more humor more gay and less introspective and depressing. im sorry jasper's unconscious for most of this it's just. it's the way of the world. he's napping
> 
> anyways im sorry this chapter and fic as a whole is so shitty im kinda just here for the laffs my dudes


	5. how did we end up in my neighbor's pool?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i forgot to mention all the weird chapter titles are lines from "dont threaten me with a good time" by p!atd because the song is fitting for the premise of this fic which has definitely and obviously gotten away from me in my pursuit of sadness and gay

The Conclave kicks off with the ringing of a ceremonial call bell, and there’s a stretch of long, blue plywood separating the newcomers and their opponents. On one end of the battlefield, an aspiring history professor unironically donning a blazer at a sorority party, and a visibly drunk, evil-looking white guy at his hip like a key-chain. On the other end of the expanse, a woman flaunting purple braids and brimming with anticipation, and starboard-- a gargantuan of a frat boy turning to steel.

Bellamy can say with confidence, flicking a celluloid sphere with expert precision, that his flawless aim might not be enough. The pong ball dribbles into a solo cup with a soft clatter, and Murphy hoots excitedly, nudging Bellamy with a sharp elbow as half of their collective opponent takes the contents down and tosses the cup aside. Murphy steps up to bat with a cocky chuckle, rolling his shoulders as he squints against the harsh light of the second floor and shoots his shot. Nothin’ but net, the ball lands with a ‘plonk’ and Man of Steel tips it back like it’s a tall glass of water, crushes it on his forehead. Murphy blinks up at Bellamy with a frightened grin, eyes sparkling, and after that he can’t remember much more of the game.

Murphy downs their lost cups in stride, buzzing with fresh alcohol and the rush of a good fight. When Bellamy dunks the final goal Murphy is overcome with adrenaline, barks out a startled laugh and slaps him hard on the chest, then throws himself forward to press his warm cheek against the fabric of Bellamy’s shirt right where he’d shocked the skin red with the whip of a palm-- like some sort of apology. It’s the Murphy-equivalent of kissing a boo-boo all better, but Bellamy isn’t feeling too hot when the pinned location on a map of touches is alight with a prickling flame for the rest of the night.

They receive their blue beads on the next floor, Murphy holding his clacking chain of plastic orbs over his head like it’s a WWE title belt as they clamor up to the following challenge. Bellamy can’t help but start to smile when he realizes what faces them.

He looks to the stringy-haired freak at his side with a quirked brow, and Murphy twists towards him with an absolutely satanic grin, looking positively diabolical.

“You got this?” Bellamy asks, knowing the answer.

Murphy scoffs. “I’ve trained my entire life for this.”

Rival school parties, the school cafeteria, Bellamy’s dirty kitchen.

Now they’re in the octagon.

Bellamy makes a note to mark it down as the night he finally witnesses John Murphy, known, tragically, throughout high school as the Milkman, successively chug an entire gallon of skim milk in under a minute without losing a drop, for the first time in their pitiful, pitiful little lives.

“Milkman, reigning champ, motherfuckers,” he mutters, fist held high in the air even as he hunches over, near collapse. He’s still the champ when Bellamy has to wrap an arm around his waist and guide him to a handful of rose-colored beads, console him when Murphy begins to make soft retching noises from behind his hand.

Still the champ.

The next floor greets them with low white lights and a round table, aces of hearts and the indignant redyellowblue faces of Medieval kings passed from puckered lips to smiling mouths.

“Now what in the fresh hell...”

Murphy leans heavily into him. Rivulets of ice shiver up Bellamy’s spine and fuck that, he wishes he were a invertebrate. “Suck-and-blow,” Murphy hisses, clutching his gut like it’s an open wound.

“Su- what?”

“Oh, you poor big dumb baby,” Murphy rushes out in one condescending breath. "You gotta- ugh-” he’s broken off by a sharp wince. “I’ll show you.”

The next round of competitors files in and Bellamy tries to fumble his way into a seat by his friend. Murphy snickers weakly, bright, patronizing laugh weighed down by previous circumstances. “I guess you could sit next to me, but it’s sort of one of _those_ games,” he says with an uneasy grin, jerking his head towards the frat boys settling down next to blushing sorority girls.

 _“Oh,”_ Bellamy breathes. He maneuvers to a chair across the table from him, between a girl with strawberry blonde curls and another painted into a sickeningly bright yellow tank-top. Keeps his eyes on Murphy like he was instructed to when a hand-bell chimes and a small woman with a tattoo inked unforgiving and bold across her face slaps a Jack of spades over her lips. Bellamy had expected to be using his hands, which clench uncomfortably into fists under the table as Murphy stifles a smile, forms his mouth into a small “O” and inhales, suctioning the playing card against his lips and passes it onto the next player the same way, eyes never leaving Bellamy.

The game might have been fun. Maybe. If Bellamy hadn’t looked across the maple-wood playing field to Murphy at the exact moment the card slipped from the girl’s control, leaving her lips to bump shyly against Murphy’s, leaving them to blush, to smile, to laugh.

It was just... annoying. That’s all. It was a stupid game.

 

*******

 

“Dude, that’s just not right.”

“I’m almost done, man, fuck off.”

The foyer is thick with smoke. The couch is leather, an earthy, muddy red. The side-table houses a shuddering golden-glowing lamp, stained glass shade. Perhaps the buyer hoped bringing a little semblance of church to their sitting room would give them a down payment on a slot in Heaven. Jasper Jordan’s limp hand unfolds across the base of it, and if he’s the body of Christ, someone is going to burn in Hell.

“Miller, he’s waking up, bro. Let’s wrap this up,” Stoner #1 presses, sweeping dark fringe from his eyes with the fingers not pinching a sad-looking blunt.

“Do not rush me, Monty. This is my art,” retaliates Stoner #2, holding up his Magic Marker with a flourish. He scratches his stubble thoughtfully, before he’s startled from his inspiration by a harsh slap on the back.

“You’ve done enough, Chagall!” the former insists, and Stoner #2 waves a hand forcefully in front of Jasper’s desecrated face.

“It’s says “DOUCHEBA”! I’m not done!”

“The public will understand,” Stoner #1 consoles, flicking the remnants of his joint into the ashtray under God’s lamp and stumbling out of the enclosure with the darker man’s hand in his grip as he moans and whines about the pain of creation, eyes brimming bright crimson, and Stoner #1 isn’t sure if he’s kidding anymore.

DOUCHEBA rests quietly, oblivious to his legal renaming.

 

*******

 

“Top floor, baby!” Murphy crows, tugging Bellamy along by an abused blazer lapel, whose mind is so far removed that he can’t react, can’t respond, can’t do anything but imagine he were the Jack of spades they left behind.

When did he dig himself into a hole so deep?

“Your gold, champions,” says a dark-eyed woman at the top of the stairs, and Bellamy tries to look away from the numerous scars criss-crossing her face, prays to God Murphy won’t point a finger and start asking “Birth or bad choices?”.

“What the hell is this?” Murphy grumbles, dangling another string of tacky plastic beads in front of narrowed eyes. Gold.

“You may enter,” she adds, rolling her eyes so far back that they go white.

The attic is humid, syrupy beams hatched as the backdrop behind a harshly hand-made throne of branches and sticks, complete with a dizzying-ly adorned sorority RA, dressed in a blood red cape and melting black eye-makeup. "Congratulations, champions."

“You’re, uh-” Murphy gestures indistinctly around his eyes. “Sweating your eyes off.”

The Commander cocks her head, unamused. “The A.C. is weak at this level.”

Bellamy pockets his hands, rolls forward on the balls of his heels absently. “That’ll do it.”

Crickets chirp outside. A car passes by. It’s 2:20 A.M. The attic is, presumably, about 83 degrees Fahrenheit.

The silence croaks, dies under a question mark. “So is that it?”

“Is what what?”

Murphy waves his hands around the attic. “Is that all?”

“I don’t understand-”

A light-bulb. “Do you know Clarke Griffin?” Bellamy remembers to ask, remembers why they "battled" through the Conclave, why they’re piled high in multicolored beads in the first place.

Her face flickers with surprise. “I know the name, yes.”

“Would you maybe know where we could find her?”

She chews absently on her thumbnail for a moment, another streak of heavy eyeliner smudging further down her cheek with a rolling bead of sweat. “Alpha Sigma Theta on Weather St.,” she blurts. “Or so I hear.”

Murphy turns to him with raised brows, seemingly surprised that they actually got what they wanted, and then turns to The Commander with a mock salute and turns on his heel to head back down the stairs, beads clacking noisily as he goes. Bellamy waves gratefully at the RA, whose cheeks are rosy as she sits a little more upright in her makeshift throne.

He stumbles after Murphy as they make their way down the steps, and the boy is moving with unnerving purpose and uniformity. “Slow up, Terminator,” Bellamy jokes, but Murphy keeps at it, not giving him a second glance.

“Hey, hey-” his hand on the kid’s arm before he’s thought better of it, and soon enough Murphy’s ripped his entire body away and stumbling down to the empty platform between staircases with cold eyes and shoulders tensed, looking coiled up the way he does right before someone gets the shit kicked out of them.

“Don’t fucking touch me, man.”

Bellamy recoils as if burnt. “What’s gotten into you, dude? You were all hoots ‘n hollers ten seconds ago.”

Murphy’s face twists up in annoyance, like Bellamy had just spit at his feet. “Guess I was just feeling like we were in high school again, you know, when you were lame enough to be friends with me, scholar.”

“Murphy, dude-” he heaves in a breath like he’s about to free-dive the Marina Trench, and he sure as hell feels like he’s already drowning. “I didn’t mean that, you know that. It just- I didn’t mean that.”

“Yeah,” Murphy mutters. “I know.”

He lifts a string of green beads from his shoulders and loops it around Bellamy’s neck.

_They’re on their stomachs in the grass of Bellamy’s backyard. He flips a page of Caesar and Christ, a gentler sun than that of summer’s covering them as a blanket. Murphy picks another dandelion and slides it underneath the last page, presses it against the words “the world honors form as well as substance.” Bellamy knows he isn’t meant to hold false idols, that he shouldn’t be comparing them to Gods, to rulers, but he can’t help but think (what with the way Murphy’s stretched out in the clovers like that) that perhaps he himself is Caesar, and perhaps his brother is Christ._

Blue beads atop those like stringed teardrops.

_They’re in the neighbor’s pool. The pale boy’s shoulders glisten, glazed with water and kissed with sun that always seemed to be overhead, seemed to love them. Murphy’s eyes look singed, pinkish from the chlorine, yet bluer than Bellamy’s ever seen anything be blue. His are still just brown. Maybe they aren’t brothers after all._

Drops the plastic parade of violet orbs over his head.

_They’re in a planetarium and Murphy can’t stop crying. Bellamy’s bottom lip is a dark purple bruise and the boy to his left apologized five times last weekend for it and it seemed like the biggest deal in the world in the moment. His father’s crumpled body being draped in a sheet on the cracks in the sidewalk just a few blocks down the road in the very same breath begged to differ. Bellamy’s doing everything he can to make the tears stop coming, keeps elbowing him at mentions of Uranus, but they’re sitting right under a certain constellation, Orion he thinks, that his father always seemed to be able to find and Murphy can’t stop crying._

The golden beads come down like a too-heavy halo on an angel that wasn’t really supposed to be up there in the first place.

_It’s twenty seconds later and they’re in the foyer of a sorority house, Bellamy’s shoulders are heavy with the colors of beads/the weight of the world. The left of Murphy is painted in vivid, broken chunks of a stained glass window as the golden church lamp light pours over him. The younger boy collapses onto the leather stretch with his head on Jasper Jordan’s sleeping shoulder and grins, a vandalized forehead on clear display. Murphy looks to be bathed in honey, falsely sweet and forgiving and shimmering like fool’s gold and Bellamy doesn’t know what he wants, who he is, what they are anymore._

“Guess we better go find your Blondie, boy scout.”

He’s too goddamn drunk for this.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic is pure chaos im honestly just trying to write colors instead of plot at this point and im so sorry


	6. i roam the city in a shopping cart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hate this chapter this sucks

 

  The end of the street is dotted with little beige and brown houses like dull fireflies and Murphy’s watching Bellamy watching him but neither of them have turned their heads from the tiny buildings scattered before them. It’s tragic, really.

“Is that a cobblestone driveway? Who does that?” Bellamy shrugs, Jasper Jordan draped over one of his shoulders like a sack of potatoes and Murphy’s mouth is dry, in all honesty.

“Your girl’s a real princess, huh?” If there’s a bite of something tinged with jealousy to it, Bellamy doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes look glazed over, his head somewhere farther behind them and wrapped around a street sign. He has yet to respond to Murphy’s one-sided bickering, which grows more and more desperate by the minute, as the silence gets bigger.

Alpha Sigma Theta comes into view at the end of a path of rose bushes, untrimmed and intimidating more than welcoming. _“The universe has kindly given you another chance to close, soft eight. Will you take it?”_ Murphy teases, voice deep and questioning in the same way he’d read the bold options in _Choose Your Own Adventure_ books. His favorite was always “Space Patrol”. Bellamy’s was “The Throne of Zeus”. Whenever Bellamy asked for help deciding, his friend would kindly point to whichever he thought would lead to Bellamy’s fictional demise.

Tradition be damned if he isn’t doing the same now.

“Hello, Earth to Bellamy?”

Bellamy blinks out of his haze, fog clearing partially as he glances at Murphy and heaves a slipping Jasper back onto his shoulder. “What?”

“Are you giving me the silent treatment or fantasizing about Blondie? Keep it in your pants for like, five minutes, the door’s right up there,” Murphy advises, and Bellamy visibly bristles, cheeks going dark.

“Lay off, Murphy,” he scolds with a mutter, walking further ahead and keeping his back to Murphy, who falls behind, mouth quirking with a self-satisfied smile.

Bellamy stomps up the porch steps and bangs on the door, hard, and Murphy’s never seen him do more than softly crack his knuckles against their neighbor’s door to ask for the soccer ball they kicked over the fence, pegs it on him being drunk and tired and probably a little fed up.

A small, familiar blonde opens the door, peers through the slot and then forms a surprised 'o' with her lips before undoing the chain and widening the entrance. “Bellamy? What are you doing here?”

He gestures vaguely at Jasper hanging limply over him like a scarf and Clarke lifts her eyebrows, but steps aside and motions for the three of them to come in, never fully looking away from Bellamy, as far as Murphy can tell.

Bellamy carries Jasper to the dining table and heaves him into one of the straight-backed chairs with a grunt, leaving the unconscious kid’s head to loll onto the cherry hardwood pathetically. Clarke blinks in surprise. “Seems like you three had quite the night,” she says, flitting to the kitchen to pour dish soap and warm water onto a cloth.

“He blacked out pretty early on and Murphy and I...” his gaze flickers to Murphy before it’s gone again. “We won the, uh, Commander’s Conclave? And left Jasper with some stoners who didn't turn out to be the best of babysitters, in retrospect.”

Clarke grins, bright and excitable as she makes her way to the table and pulls out a chair in front of Jasper, begins to scrub at **DOUCHEBA** with a handful of bubbles. “You? I thought you were a straight arrow.”

Murphy snorts, but Bellamy doesn’t even humor him with a laugh or an insult or a glare or... or _anything_.

“He went to Space Camp,” Murphy tries again. Clarke doesn’t look his way. “Straight arrow.”

“I have a wild side,” Bellamy argues, smile creeping onto his face at Clarke’s amused look for the first time in hours and Murphy can’t fucking believe this. “Sometimes I go swimming after I eat, I don’t even wait the full twenty minutes.”

Murphy’s fuming. _We_ used to go swimming after _we_ ate. _We_ didn't even wait the full twenty minutes.  _We._

“You’re a damn renegade, huh?” Clarke muses, scrubbing with a little less ferocity at Jasper’s raw pink forehead, **DOUCHEBA** only slightly faded.

Bellamy laughs, soft and throaty in the way that makes Murphy’s heart pound and the latter excuses himself to the nearest bathroom without an announcement.

*******

The older man watches Murphy’s back as he escapes down the hall, scans his body, shoulders tensed and ears burning bright red, twisting his fingers in the way that he does and making himself look small as he disappears around a corner and fuck, he’s still mad?

Bellamy hasn’t gotten one laugh out of him in hours and goddamn if he isn’t trying.

“You two fighting?” Clarke muses. “If you were strangers to me I’d think you were an old married couple.”

Bellamy sighs, cheeks burning. “It’s been... a night.”

She whistles, low. “Apparently.”

  
*******

  
He glances up at himself in the bathroom mirror, cold water thoroughly splashed against his face and clinging to his brows, the tip of his nose, running from his jaw to his chin in freezing rivulets.

_You decide to lie down on the floor and die there,_   
_turn to last page._

_**You decide to suck it up,** _   
_**turn to page 108.** _

*******

They’re all shits and giggles when he's dried his face with a wad of toilet paper and shuffled, resigned, mostly, back to the front of the house, and Murphy told himself he’d get it together but the hair is standing up on the back of his neck.

_**You attack,** _   
_**turn to next page.** _

_You surrender,_   
_turn to page 119._

“I’m beyond tickled that we’re all having a fucking whale of a time but can we get this kid’s address considering that’s all we came here for in the first place?”

Clarke looks shocked, blinks up to Bellamy for refuge, who sighs in resignation and picks Jasper’s permanent marker-streaked head up off of the table. “Sorry about... him. We came by to ask if you knew where Jasper Jordan here lives, since you were, like, pre-med with him.”

Murphy crosses his arms and has the nerve to look satisfied after his outburst.

“Uh...” Clarke shifts, uneasy between the weight of their stares and Murphy’s general presence. “I don’t know, I’m sorry.”

Murphy throws up his hands, exasperation evident in his tone when he asks “Do you know if he had any friends who we could ask?”

She shrugs, tucking some golden hair behind her ear, Bellamy’s eyes following the movement, and Murphy wants to cut all of it off. “I met Jasper in my remedial science study group, he didn’t talk to anyone there. So, no. Sorry.”

Bellamy blinks. “Remedial group?”

“I’m a Biology major, I tutor kids who are struggling.”

Murphy steps forward from the foyer, looking torn between anger and curiosity. “Jasper Jordan invented science. I don’t think he’d need _you_ to tutor him.”

Clarke turns on him, annoyed. “Actually, he’s failing out of school.”

Bellamy’s eyes widen to a comical size. “But- why wouldn’t he tell us?”

“Maybe because you’re an elitist prick and he didn’t want to be publicly shamed,” Murphy grumbles, and Bellamy’s brows pull together angrily, his mouth opening and closing like he wants to say something, but the coldness to Murphy’s eyes stops him in his tracks.

“Friends tell each other stuff like that.”

“Maybe we aren’t all as in love with you as you think, Bell. _Maybe_ we aren't fucking friends,” Murphy snaps, and Clarke makes her way to the kitchen, head ducked.

Bellamy gapes. “You’re gonna drop that shit on me right now? We’re in the middle of a fucking crisis and you want to do this now?” He marches forward and shoves Murphy in the chest, just enough to send him stumbling, hip biting into the back of the couch in the living room. He tangles a fist in his t-shirt and pushes up against him, towering over him without being all that much taller. “Fine, let’s do this now. What’s your fucking problem with me lately, Murphy?”

The pale boy blinks, fire crawling up his throat and burning behind his teeth.

“They’re going to _love_ you in Virginia.”

The hand twisted against Murphy’s sternum loosens up at that, starts to fall away. Murphy can feel his breath against his mouth, his nose, dissolving in his eyes and fogging him over with Bellamy, Bellamy, Bellamy, _Bellamy._

“I’ll adapt to the change, but thanks for your concern.”

He lets go, fingers uncurling and he pushes himself away from the couch, away from Murphy. Pulls Jasper onto his shoulders and leaves the former there, sinking, drowning, hands wrapped around the back of the couch like a lifeline.

Clarke comes timidly out of the kitchen, murmurs something to Bellamy about a pep leader on campus whose phone is full of names, numbers and addresses of students for sending out event flyers, there’s a rally on the other side of campus, she’ll drive them there, etc. etc. etc.

He says thank you, you’ve been a huge help, etc. etc. etc.

Murphy stumbles out of the house after Bellamy, follows him down the porch steps and the cobblestone driveway and clambers into the backseat of a little red bug right behind him, like he always does.

Their arms, shoulders, sides, thighs are all sandwiched together in the vehicle made for ants. Bellamy makes a point of staring ahead, glaring daggers into the headrest of the driver’s seat, Jasper’s head in his lap and the kid’s legs flung over Murphy’s. “I’ve taken shits bigger than this car,” Murphy muses, and... nothing.

_I’ll adapt to the change I’ll adapt to the change I’ll adapt to the change- I’ve loved you all our lives, you’re my brother, you’re the head and the heart and the hands and I’m just a big mouth on a cold, dead body. If you leave me I’ll never- I can’t walk on sidewalks without you (and I’m not afraid of walking in the road), I can’t go into planetariums or pools or lie in grass or play darts or read books or even laugh without thinking of you- you ruined my fucking life, you son of a bitch. You took everything from me._

Instead he says, “Good talk,” and pretends he’s not watching Bellamy's reflection in the window, pretends the rose bushes lining stone driveways are enrapturing, pretends he doesn’t want to open the car door when Clarke starts driving and throw himself out of it when he sees contorted reflection Bellamy wipe at his eyes.

_I’ve loved you all our lives and it’s fucking ruined mine, so forgive me for not kissing you on the mouth every time you exist. Forgive me for hating you for making yourself half of me._

“I’m sorry,” he says. It’s a croaky little whisper and Bellamy doesn’t look at him.

But his fingers creep to meet Murphy's between them, intertwining with his like it’s something they just  _do,_ rolls his knuckles against the top of the boy's thigh and Murphy doesn’t try and figure it out. This was the last page of "The Throne of Zeus". This is the one where they don’t die no matter how hard Murphy tries to fuck them over, to map out all the bold choices Bellamy gave him and ruin them to make him keep reading.

Bellamy deserves Virginia, deserves Clarke or whoever else makes him smile like he used to, deserves to choose his own adventure and if he wants love instead of Murphy, so be it.

_**You decide to be his prologue,** _   
_**turn to page one.** _

 

_******* _

The car screeches to a stop and the three boys crammed into the backseat file out clumsily, Murphy reluctantly pulling his fingers from Bellamy’s hand to heave Jasper off of the pavement. He catches his eyes for a moment, and Bellamy smiles, soft and honest.

[But no, because Bellamy’s adamantly straight, (not in love with him), and leaving to get a job in a nearby state, not dying, (not in love with him). Murphy’s going to go home to his gas station night shift and his futon and won’t see him again for years because (they aren’t in love) they aren’t brothers, just friends who used to be sort of close, he guesses, and this is just a night out gone wrong, (not a love story), and it’s all just, stupid.

And anyway, he’s drunk.]

“Good luck, guys,” Clarke calls, grinning awkwardly from the front seat.

“You sure you don’t want to come with us?” Bellamy offers, and she shakes her head.

“Sorry, I’d love to but I’m already late for that party.”

Murphy pipes up, arms tucked uncomfortably under Jasper as Bellamy slacks on his end. “So how do we find this guy, anyway?”

“Pep rally’s down that path,” she gestures vaguely to the dirt path in the grassy area behind them. “He should be around this big van, it’s called the Spirit Mobile.”

“And why is this guy going to help us, again?”

Clarke tilts her head. “Because he’s my boyfriend? I thought I mentioned that.”

Bellamy blinks. “We must have, uh, missed that.”

Murphy stares.

“Have a nice night, Clarke. Thanks again,” he says, all genuine politeness, no bite. She gives a sweet smile and a wave as he shuts their door and she pulls away onto the rain-slicked road.

“Don’t,” Bellamy warns. Murphy shrugs.

“I’m not gonna say anything.”

A pause.

“It’s crazy though, that she had a boyfriend the whole time. Right?”

“Stop.”

“I’m just saying, like, not to rub salt in the wound, but scientifically you weren’t gonna close even if you could have,” he muses. “No offense.”

Bellamy shoves at his shoulder and hardly looks upset, actually seems happier than usual. Murphy bumps him with a hip, knocking him off the path, and they’re grinning ear to ear again like they hadn't just been at each other's throats as the bonfire comes into view, pounding music and hundreds of bodies like scattered ants bustling just down the hill.

“It’s okay, man, really. You’ll find someone,” Murphy offers, face open and genuine for once even as he smiles a little bit maliciously against the moon’s glow.

Bellamy can’t tear his eyes away. “Yeah,” he breathes. “Maybe.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was some TRASH i hate this chapter with my entire heart but we have almost Reached Our Conclusion so hey there's that


	7. champagne, cocaine, gasoline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> shit hits the fan. shit gets real

 

“I imagine this must be what Hell looks like,” Murphy ponders aloud, and the man port bound snorts quietly to himself in agreement, eyes traveling over the roaring pit of flames in the dead center of a rowdy crowd of drunk (or maybe just extremely peppy) college students.

On queue, enter stage right: a mascot dressed as the devil himself, pumping his felt-pitchfork in the air rhythmically as the red-and-white cheerleaders hoot and squeal cheerfully at his passing.

“The Thelonious State University Devils. How... convenient.”

“I always knew I’d end up here, but maybe not so soon. And my hair could look better,” Murphy muses.

Bellamy spares him a sideways glance, quirks an eyebrow. “Couldn’t it always?”

The boy scrunches up his face mockingly and jostles his head a bit, lips pulling down in a cartoon-ish frown. “You’re one to talk, Curly Fry.”

“My ringlets are luscious and endearing,” Bellamy demands, staring ahead determinedly despite the blush rising behind his cheeks as Murphy hums in reluctant agreement and plunders on as if he hadn’t.

The path to this mystical pep leader seems everlasting, unwavering and frankly, Bellamy is tired of walking, and poor Murphy’s apparent asthma (poor health from years of smoking and potato chips and a lot of inhalants and more potato chips) has him wheezing out rattling breaths with each footstep.

“I’m gonna ask for directions,” he says decidedly, and Murphy allows another longer squeak to pass before he holds out a firm arm and stops walking.

“Don’t you dare. I know where we’re going.”

“You don’t, though,” Bellamy argues, and Murphy turns on him in a flash.

“I fucking do! Princess said to find the big van, and I happen to be familiar with big vans and their general appearance.”

“Ah, yes, from your kidnapping and serial killing days.”

Murphy nods absently, clearly no longer listening as he scans the area with revived purpose.

Bellamy’s got his teeth in something fun now, so he pushes a little. “You were more into the end product if I remember correctly, yeah?”

He hums something related to the word ‘yes’, eyes soaking in every last detail of their surrounding area with intense focus, Bellamy’s voice somewhere on the other side of the world to him.

“The beheading, mostly? Or were you after a full freezer?”

Murphy chuckles, empty and far away. “Yeah, man,” he mutters, as if he’s confirming the contents of their grocery list and not blankly confessing to a history of homicide.

Bellamy’s enjoying this far too much. “How many jars of eyeballs would you say?”

He turns imperceptibly and looks him dead in the face. “Six.”

Bellamy visibly pales, turns his head down to kick at pebbles and dust as Murphy explodes into sweet laughter, something like giggles but a little gruffer, a little wheezier. “Don’t be a fucking creep, man. You always ruin it.”

*******

A big, red block that looks a little bit like Clifford in the distance appears out of thin air from the shadows as they get closer to the outskirts of the rally, and Bellamy picks up to a jog as he spots it. “The van!”

“The _Spirit Mobile,_ ” Murphy corrects, and Bellamy can’t be bothered to harass him for it.

They turn the corner, and the guy leaning against the van looks over them with eyes screwed narrow and judge-ily. Bellamy thinks they must look like a nightmare, Jasper hung between them, now groaning groggily as he finally comes to, what with all the sudden running and Murphy’s fluttering wheezes becoming practically animalistic as his lungs shrivel up like raisins left in the sun. Bellamy’s blazer covered in spilled Pabst and Murphy’s entirety looking similar, a double-rainbow of colorful trash beads circled around their necks, **DOUCHEBA** properly smudged to hell across Jasper’s forehead.

“You the king cheerleader?” Murphy asks, breathless but somehow still demanding, eyes cast to the ground as he tries to regain his dignity, the missing fraction of it lost somewhere in the grass soaked with dewdrops and shitty beer.

“If you mean pep leader, that’s me,” a shiny-looking kid with long coffee-brown hair-- a knockoff brand Murphy with kinder eyes-- says confidently.

“Give us your phone,” Murphy insists. Bellamy gapes at him.

“No- I’m sorry- he’s drunk-”

“You’re drunk too, bitch-”

“Would you have any information on Jasper Jordan? He’s a student here and we need his ad-”

“Wait a second..." The pep leader takes a threatening step forward. "You’re that fucking prick who darted me at the bar!”

Murphy blinks, and then breaks into a lip-splitting grin. “Well I’ll be damned. How’s that cheek hole treating you, Pom-poms?”

Bellamy’s head is spinning. “What’s going on here?”

Murphy presses a hand against Jasper’s chest and throws his other arm around his shoulders heavily, leaving Bellamy to scramble to hold the both of them up. “Me and Jasper Jordan here accidentally, uh- _poked_ this kind fellow at the bar early on this evening. What an adventure this night has been, let me tell you-”

“Shut up, man. You desecrated sacred ground is what you did.”

“Look,” Bellamy tries, floundering and internally cursing Murphy once again for always ruining something with accidental violence. “You give us his address and we’re out of your sight for good, okay?”

The young man cracks his knuckles, winces a little. Bellamy shows him mercy for brownie points and pretends not to notice. “Okay, right after I settle down with my scalpel-- oh, _clean,_ no worries--- and try my hand and that little makeover I promised your drinking buddies here earlier, I'll give you what you need. Remember that deal, Frogger?”

Murphy purses his lips. “Okay, careful, because Face Off is definitely copyrighted and you can't go into court looking like," he gestures broadly with his hands moving in little circles over the other man's face, "that. And at least my eyes are far apart enough to have peripheral,” he bargains, stepping forward to hold out a three beside the pep leader’s head. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Bellamy swears under his breath as the other man’s jaw visibly locks and he pounces on Murphy, taking him down to the wet grass with a squeak and a shuffle. Bellamy says his prayers for the cheerleader and props Jasper up against the van as he crouches to scoop up the forgotten phone from the grass, wipe it off on his pant leg and glance up from the mile-long contact list to check on Murphy periodically, though he knows how these things always go.

Jackson, Jackson, James, Jefferson, Jenkins-

The burning match rolling on the ground with the campus pep leader grips the front of a red-and-white uniform with white knuckles, raises his fist and brings it down with flames licking the air behind it. It settles heavily against the enemy’s cheekbone in a lightning flash and leaves a splatter of red hot blood behind it. Bellamy winces.

Jennings, Johnson, Jones, Jones, Jones-

Pom-poms gets a good lick at Murphy, whose puffy little bottom lip splits at the seams and gushes open to lead a trickling of blood down to his chin, jagged, due to his lurching side to side as he straddles his opponent-- who attempts to buck him off with frantic hands and some erratic jerking of his hips, despite Murphy pinning him down with one hand and raining down punches with the other. Bellamy is both frightened and a little turned on. He’ll beat himself up over that particular fact at a later time to be determined.

Jordan.

202 Vincent Ave.

_Bingo._

“I’ve got the address, Murph! Let’s go!” Bellamy roars over the sound of skin against fists and grass dying under careless writhing bodies.

He should know better by now, Bellamy thinks. Murphy’s eyes have gone dark and wide like a feeding shark’s, and Bellamy pitches himself forward to grab Murphy by the arms and tug him backwards. He goes dead weight for a moment, rooting himself to the ground as he pushes down on the other kids’ ribs, but Bellamy jerks him back hard, tearing Murphy off his victim like a band-aid.

He lies flattened in the grass, looking up at the moon with shiny eyes and a pouting chin painted stark crimson against snow white skin.

“Welcome to the world of the living, it’s time to fucking go.”

Murphy blinks, looking suddenly like a wounded doe, breathing heavily. “He hit me first.”

Bellamy rubs at his temples, a conflicted sigh tearing from his lips. “I just- I don’t care, just grab Jasper Jordan and let’s get out of here.”

Murphy pushes himself up, starts to turn to survey his damage. “Don’t look back at him,” Bellamy orders. Murphy exhales shakily, nodding, and making himself small after ravaging another human body like a hurricane. They have done this too many times to count and Bellamy should know better by now but his eyes begin to soften anyway.

“Go get Jas,” Bellamy repeats, and Murphy offers him a fluttering sigh of acquiescence as he inspects his bloody knuckles and turns obediently on his heel. When Murphy’s out of earshot, Bellamy tosses the phone to the ground beside the pep leader’s battered body, who groans, twisting in the grass.“You hit him first.”

He knows better.

“Bell, little problem here!”

He glances over his shoulder, finds Murphy standing to the wheel of the Spirit Mobile, no Jasper Jordan in visible range.

No.

“We lost the hamster.”

Bellamy breaks into a sprint to the van, eyes roaming dizzily for a lanky bald kid strolling drunkenly around the shadows of a bonfire. “Where the hell-”

“Need a ride, boys?” a voice slurs happily from somewhere above them. God had a deeper voice in his Old Testament audio book. He blinks up, sight falling on the open window of the pep squad van. Jasper grins, toothy and lazily from the driver’s seat. 

“What the fuck? Finn! Oh my God!” a girl’s voice cries out, and Bellamy’s getting a hearty heaping of vertigo as he swings his head back around again to find a small group of cheerleaders and plaid-donning frat boys approaching like an army, and fast.

“Who did this to you, man?”

A shaky finger raised, pointing confidently at the wide-eyed offenders. A hand circled around his wrist and Bellamy’s being yanked into the passenger seat of the Spirit Mobile, sitting half on-top of John Murphy as their absolutely wasted, license-less friend stamps the gas pedal like it’s the world’s biggest arachnid, and he can honestly say he’s been in worse situations.

He has to put a pin in that ranking when they make it off the dirt path and onto the actual, real road, and Jasper’s swerving and excitedly chanting “Serpentine, serpentine, serpentine!” as Murphy tries to tear the wheel from his grasp.

A pair of headlights and the feeling of floating and Murphy looking at him with his mouth open like he’s going to say something world-changing and a really, really big oak tree.

And then nothing, mostly.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shit hit the fan. shit got real.
> 
>  
> 
> (please comment thoughts im straight up desperate at this point like this genuinely a cry for help)


	8. now i wish that i could find my clothes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things keep happening

 

The last thing Jasper remembers is eating a peanut that Murphy found on the sidewalk.

So, needless to say, waking up in a room smelling, looking and feeling distinctly _hospital_ \-- well, it’s disarming.

He lets his head loll to his left, finds Bellamy curled on his side in a polka-dotted hospital gown, muscular arm tucked protectively over his stomach, sound asleep. There’s a little gash across the bridge of his nose, a dark bruise creeping into his hairline. He turns to his right, shifting a little in the blue sheets, and his eyes land on Murphy in a matching gown, but his body looks like he threw himself into a cheese grater. Sort of like how he usually looked slinking into class the morning after a nasty street brawl back in high school, but worse. The left side of his face is marked with three long, narrow scratches, from his brow to his jawline. Bandages creep up from his right shoulder, the same arm in a navy blue sling. His bottom lip is swollen and scabbed. Jasper’s own injuries consist of a massive headache and the sudden ability to hear _everything._

“Bellamy,” he whispers. Bellamy does not stir. “Bellamy!” Jasper hisses again, reaches out to rattle the curtain bunched up against the wall. The clanging of the metal rings against the curtain rod startles him awake.

“Jas, you’re okay,” Bellamy says, groggily and looking nervous, disoriented. His eyes flicker immediately to something, someone, over Jasper’s shoulder. He scans Murphy, taking in the state of his body with a calculating look, before his eyes soften, his mouth quirking to the side in some unusual expression that Jasper’s never seen on his face before. It doesn’t fit him right.

“What happened?”

“Long story,” Bellamy mutters, eyes fluttering closed again as he raises a hand to his likely aching head.

“Wait-” Something crucial and distant, unreachable, lands in his already untrustworthy stomach like an anvil. “What time is it?” Jasper says, suddenly, sitting up straight in bed.

Bellamy blinks against the harsh light and looks around for a clock, before a low voice answers, “Seven a.m.”. Jasper’s head nearly spins off his shoulders when he finds who the voice belongs to, the man leaning against the door frame with his arms crossed, in a perpetually pressed suit. “I’ll express my disappointment later. If you get up now we might make it to your appointment with Dr. Griffin,” he says, all in one level breath, like he’d been expecting this.

Jasper blinks. “My suit isn’t pressed.”

A long, heavy sigh fills the room as he rolls his eyes and raises an arm to check his wristwatch. “I’d been expecting that, knowing you. I did it myself, you can change after we get you checked out of here. Now, say goodbye to these delinquents for good and come get in the goddamn car.”

Jasper looks nervously over at Bellamy, who lies staring bewildered at Mr. Jordan, brows scrunched together in a look of disbelieving anger. “For good?” Jasper says, although it comes out as more of a croak than a question.

His uncle barks out a thundering, demeaning laugh that would frighten off a flock of birds within a hundred mile radius, startling Murphy awake. His bed squeaks loudly as his head flies from the pillow, eyes darting around the room wildly until they finally land on Bellamy. The older man holds out a reassuring hand and nods his head to the side, gesturing for Murphy to lie back down, who obeys calmly and quietly, dropping his likely spinning head to the bed again before fixing his stare on Mr. Jordan.

“Yes, for good. You really think I’m going to allow you to associate with these criminals again, after what they put you through tonight?”

“They’re not criminals, they’re my friends,” Jasper mumbles, and looks to his right at the pale, disfigured boy, the _definite_ criminal, who smiles gently, entirely un-Murphy. Jasper feels confidence well up in his chest at the sight of that encouraging, _definitely_ criminal grin.

“Friends? After they almost gladly robbed you of your future to pull you down to the dirt with them?”

Jasper’s thoughts cling to Bellamy’s promising career as a history professor, Murphy’s invincibility and incredible knack for budgeting what little money he has, and suddenly he’s not so sure his dear uncle knows what dirt really is. “My future, or yours?”

And goddamn, did that feel _good._

“I don’t care about medicine, alright? I never have."

Mr. Jordan blanks momentarily, shocked silent for the first time in his life, before shaking his head. “You’re delirious.” He steps up to the end of the bed, hand gripping the metal bars at the foot of it. “ _I_  put a roof over your head when my brother died, _I_  fed you, _I_  clothed you. So you'll come with me and get this meeting that I _also_ got you over with before you have a chance to ruin that too.”

Jasper looks to Bellamy for help as the blankets and sheets are torn harshly from his bare legs. Bellamy nods fiercely, mouths, _“You got this.”_

It’s enough to light a fire in Jasper.

“No.”

Hell freezes over.

“No, I’m not going, I'm twenty-one now, I don't have to listen to you anymore."

 _“Oh,”_ his uncle groans, exasperated and coming closer. “Don’t be ridiculous, you’re fucking _pathetic,”_ he snaps, hand coming up to clamp his nephew’s shoulder just before the crash, the shatter, the twinkling of broken ceramic pieces on linoleum and the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor.

Jasper blinks, eyes falling on the source. Murphy sits cross-legged in his bed, uninjured arm raised above his head and clutching the jagged neck of a bedside table vase, smiling sheepishly.

“Oh my god, you just- you just bludgeoned my uncle.”

Murphy shrugs, tossing the rest of the vase onto the floor beside his uncle’s foot. “What are friends for?”

“We- we have to get out of here,” Bellamy murmurs, and the other boys turn to look at him where he sits up in bed, staring at the pile of uncle on the floor. “We have to get out of here!” he says, louder and more urgently, ripping the IV from the crook of his arm. Jasper copies him, letting the IV dangle under the pole as he creeps around the snowflakes of the vase coating the floor and crouches to check Mr. Jordan for a pulse, just in case.

As he presses his fingers to the inside of his wrist, he glances up to see Bellamy gently pluck the IV from Murphy’s usable arm, ask in a quiet, soft voice if he’s okay to walk, attempt to lift him from the armpits while Murphy swats his helpful hands away and scoots to the end of the bed himself, bare feet slapping loudly against the floor as he jumps down. Bellamy snickers a little, makes a snide comment about the other boy’s height, his hand resting against the cold, pale skin at the small of Murphy’s back where the gown has loosened. Murphy’s cheeks flush a sweet cherry color as he bumps Bellamy up against the wall and stomps ahead of him to the door.

“Okay, he’s not dead,” Jasper announces, dropping his uncle’s wrist and giving him a once-over.

“Well, I tried,” Murphy says, and Bellamy’s biting his lip to keep from laughing and leans behind him to grip the front of Jasper’s gown and shove the two of them out of the door.

“What about our clothes?” Murphy asks as the three of them storm past confused nurses and guests in their rustling gowns, bare feet slapping against tile loudly as they make their down the corridor like a paddling of angry ducks.

“Forget them, yours were disgusting anyway,” Bellamy insists, walking determinedly ahead as if escaping from hospitals is something he does regularly.

“I’d rather look disgusting than naked,” Murphy argues, and Bellamy doesn’t stop marching.

“Don’t worry, you still do,” Jasper teases, and Murphy elbows him with the lethal arm not yet in a sling.

“I’ll buy you some new ones,” Bellamy offers, just to sate him. “Happy?”

“Are we going shopping? That seems couple-y,” Murphy says, falsely cheerily, smirking as he sidles up next to Bellamy and leaves Jasper following awkwardly behind, feeling like the third wheel on a backwards, broken tricycle.

Bellamy walks faster, ears and neck darkening. “No, I’m not taking you.”

“Good, I didn’t want to go with you anyway,” Murphy huffs. “Hours of you holding up identical ugly tool blazers and asking me which one looks smarter? Sounds like a real hoo-rah.”

“When have I ever asked for your opinion?” Bellamy bites, and Murphy rolls his eyes as they turn another corner, passing another perfectly good stairwell.

“Uh, guys? I hate to break up this little lover’s quarrel, but we should probably head down some stairs to get out of here, right?” Jasper calls ahead, and the two of them stop in their tracks, heat rising to Bellamy’s face as he darkens, Murphy falling behind and rubbing his neck sheepishly as Bellamy doubles back and leads them to the last stairwell. Jasper snickers a little to himself as the door closes heavily behind them, the only sounds now the padding of bare feet on dusty cement stairs and otherwise deafening silence from his two friends.

Jasper must have missed a lot while he was out.

*******

The sun hits them like a flashlight turned on right in front of your eyes, unfamiliar and unwelcome as they stumble in their gowns to the parking lot like a band of freaks, squinting hard and waving down the lone taxi dropping someone off at the hospital’s entrance.

“Come on, come _on,”_   Bellamy begs, motioning for the taxi to pull towards them, before Murphy takes off stomping and rips the taxi door open anyway, waving Bellamy forward and clambering in behind him. Jasper weighs his options, then remembers he’s got nothing to lose anymore and pulls the door closed behind him.

“Gas pedal’s on the right,” Murphy so kindly reminds the driver after a moment of stillness, who turns at the sound of his voice and frowns.

Bellamy slaps his palm over his eyes and lowers his head. “What fucking luck.”

“What?” Jasper squeaks, checking over his shoulder out the window for any nurses or police officers that may or may not be chasing after them, before Murphy bursts into something kin to uncomfortable laughter, only a little too loud.

“Oh God, this is just too good," he gasps, clutching his stomach.

 _“What?”_ Jasper begs.

“Look, no hard feelings, right?” Murphy pleads, propping his elbow in the divider window between the front and back of the car.

“Get out of my cab,” the apparently familiar driver demands in a thick Jersey accent, trying to slide the plastic divider closed on Murphy’s arm.

“We’re kind of in a hurry, so-”

“No! Out!” the cabbie shouts, and Jasper looks to Bellamy with a bewildered look, mouthing, “What the fuck?” Bellamy just shakes his head in dismay and drops his face back to his hands.

“Okay, you’re being immature,” Murphy decides, and reaches through to forcibly put the car in gear. “DRIVE!” he demands, and the cab driver stomps the gas with wide eyes, hands gripped tense and tightly around the wheel. “519 Mecha Street,” Murphy directs, and then nods, satisfied, and shuts the divider window with a loud _‘click’._ Jasper gapes.

“I think you just threatened that cab driver,” he says, blinking slowly.

“After we dined and dashed a hospital,” Bellamy reminds.

“After smashing a vase over a renowned business man’s head and committing grand theft auto under the influence only to crash it into a tree after beating the shit out of a cheerleader,” Murphy finishes, lips pressed in a thin line. Then, he shrugs. “Anyone got cab fare?”

Bellamy finds Jasper’s eyes questioningly. Jasper holds his empty palms out, and Bellamy blinks up at Murphy with a shake of his head.

“Well, what’s robbing a cabbie to a couple of delinquents, right?” Murphy says smoothly, settling into his seat as Bellamy leans over him to buckle his seat-belt, despite the raised eyebrow Murphy gives him in turn.

Jasper watches from the window as the hospital fades into a gray speck of dust behind them and wonders if maybe, just maybe, he shouldn't have come out for that beer.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay i lied one more chapter
> 
> also im sorry this chapter was so boring and un-cute and jasper's voice is SO hard for me to capture so im sorry if it was ooc but you know, had to get that plot shit out of the way


	9. bedsheets and a morning rose

The futon is rough, dark green, plaid. It used to be just, gray.

The floor is darker, panels of maple wood instead of the cherry he remembers.

It’s- the house- it seems smaller, a little warmer.

It’s supposed to smell stale walking in, there was always rotting fruit on the kitchen table (right in the center, like it was meant to be something decorative and nice but someone just- forgot about it), his bedroom a little musty and sort of like mint chewing gum. But it’s... it doesn’t.

Bellamy holds his breath as Jasper rushes to the bathroom to wretch behind the door still creaking closed, like everything is happening a bit too fast and the hinges just woke up. The keys still jingle in Murphy’s hand before he remembers to put them back under the welcome mat, the one that reads, “Fuck Off” instead of “Welcome”.

Bellamy takes a cautious step into the kitchenette and touches all of the cabinets, peeks inside a few of them. Colorful bowls, only two. And cups, cups too, yeah, with cartoon designs on them, Hercules and Monster’s Inc., just the two. Bellamy’s eyes get a little blurry when he takes down his- the Hercules cup, and fills it with water from the kitchen sink’s faucet. He takes out the plastic cup trimmed with the little round green guy, Murphy’s all-time favorite thing of anything ever, fills it with the same lukewarm city water from the tap. When he plants it on the table, Murphy’s standing there, leaning against the door in his hospital gown, face covered in bruises and wounds and eyes and he’s staring right at him.

“What?” Bellamy asks, and settles into a kitchen chair to sip from his cup, the icy tips of animated Hades’ hair trapped under his lip. The water settles heavily in his stomach, he hears it. He does.

Murphy’s home is much quieter than he remembers.

The other boy’s jaw clicks, his Adam’s apple bobbing strangely, before he sits across the little round table from Bellamy, pulls his cup from the center to his mouth and takes a long drink.

“You need more dishes,” Bellamy scolds, rather than saying any number of other things that could have been said and maybe should have been.

Murphy shrugs. “I like these.”

_They’re eight and fourteen and Bellamy had only wanted a cup of orange juice._

_The air was dry in Murphy’s house, he slept with his mouth open when he spent the night and in the morning his tongue felt like it might shrivel up and fall down his throat, but the tap water tasted strange. He had only wanted a cup of orange juice. Murphy pads quietly into the kitchen, careful not to wake his parents, and snatches the cup from Bellamy, filling it with the water that Bellamy just doesn’t want._

_"The water’s fine,” Murphy insists, and Bellamy frowns._

_“It tastes like pennies,” he says, and Murphy straightens his pajamas and clear his throat like he’s a man._

_“Perhaps you shouldn’t eat pennies, then,” he says, in his best adult-voice, trained to perfection, and Bellamy reaches up to pour the fine, fine penny water over Murphy’s thin hair. He sputters, gasps, and then his mouth twists into a devilish smile that Bellamy would come to know so dearly, one of these days. He scrambles for the other cup on the counter, the one with big blue character spotted with lilac dots who looks more like an exotic flower than a monster, and flings its contents at Bellamy’s shirt. Bellamy gapes, wiping rogue droplets from his eyelashes, and tells his friend he’s much too old, much too mature to be hanging out at a little kid’s house anyway, and Murphy clings to his ankles as he tries to leave out the rickety front door. The both of them wrestle each other inside or outside in the doorway, soaked head to toe in questionable-at-best water, their cups lying forgotten on the glistening tile._

They’re twenty-one and twenty-seven and Murphy smiles into his cup, tries to hide his entire mouth in it but Bellamy knows the way his ears lift, his cheeks swell up like apples.

“It tastes weird, doesn’t it?” Bellamy asks, leaning behind him to rifle through the smaller drawers on the lower cabinets, teetering precariously on the back legs of his chair to do so.

Murphy snorts. “It’s vitamins, and healthy bacteria.”

“It’s pollution.”

“I'm sorry I couldn't have your spring water shipped from the Alpines in time for your arrival, your highness.”

He finds the junk drawer, because Murphy has to have a junk drawer in every room, and pinches a black marker in his fingers before he comes down on all fours again, chair-wise, and stretches across the small table to gather Murphy’s fractured arm in his hands. Murphy blinks, startled, as Bellamy uncaps the marker and begins to write on his sling, with no “please” or “would you mind?” Just blatant vandalism.

For a moment, the only sounds are that of the tip of the marker scratching against the fabric of the sling, Jasper’s gasping and vomiting from the distant bathroom, Murphy breathing strangely, like he’s forgotten how to hold air in his lungs. But it’s quiet, still. He’s quieter in homes.

_**You were born with glass bones and paper skin, every morning you break your arms, and every eve-** _

Murphy shoves his hand away with a startled laugh when his eyes catch up with Bellamy’s writing, knocking the open marker to the floor, where it leaves a thick scribble on one of the pale yellow tiles. Bellamy doesn’t get to finish his artwork, leaving the last **_e_** to look more like a little tadpole than an alphabet letter. But it’s almost more funny that way, he thinks.

The scab on Murphy's lip from the pep leader’s fist is splitting open as his lips stretch in that tight, sunny little smile. Bellamy plants his big hands on Murphy’s cheeks and shoves his smile together in the middle so it looks more like a pout. “Stop smiling,” he demands. Murphy raises an eyebrow, but with his face bunched up like more like a fish’s it’s more amusing than it is condescending.

“You’re smiling,” Murphy points out.

I am, aren’t I? Bellamy thinks. And drops his hands. And his eyes. And it. He drops it.

This home makes him feel _strange._

“We should change, right?” No.

...Oh.

“Clothes?”

Murphy throws a twisted face over his shoulder. “Yes, clothes, dumbass.”

Bellamy follows him into his old bedroom without really thinking about it, and oh God, oh God, _oh God_. He can’t look anywhere without-

_They’re seven and they’re thirteen-_

_They’re eight and they’re fourteen-_

_They’re nine and they’re fifteen-_

_They’re ten and they’re sixteen-_

_They’re-_ it’s- he’s- they’re alive and they’re everywhere and they’re in everything. _They are everything._

They are the electronic band poster peeling off of the ceiling and they are the glow-in-the-dark stars holding it up there in the first place and they are the paint stains in the carpet and they are the dents and the holes in the drywall and they are the windowsill covered in paper cootie-catchers and airplanes and one horrible, hideous little swan that looks like the Lochness monster. And they’re a little bit too old now but nothing is different, and it’s good, and Murphy’s tossing a sweatshirt at him and Bellamy gapes.

“This isn’t gonna fit me.”

“Okay Muscles, slice of humble pie’s on the counter,” Murphy huffs, pressing a bright green t-shirt with an alien on it and a pair of black joggers into Jasper’s arms, who turns and runs with his bundle of clothes back to the toilet, and the terrible sounds resume. “There might be something in the medicine cabinet, buddy!” Murphy shouts after him, and Jasper croaks out something that might be _Okay_ , or _Thanks_ , or _Fuck!_ but Bellamy’s a little disoriented at the moment.

“Here, this is yours,” Murphy grunts, flinging a plain, black, long-sleeved shirt over his shoulder. It lands with a flutter of worn fabric in front of Bellamy’s feet, and he stares at it a moment before picking it up. He pulls the hospital gown over his head and it piles up in a haphazard stack of blue dots. The shirt goes on while Murphy’s back is turned, and Bellamy stops, elbows out and nose tangled in the fabric. It smells like Murphy’s cologne (lemon Febreze from the can). Maybe he didn’t know it was Bellamy’s. But- no. He probably didn’t know.

The boy across the room pulls his sling off with a jerky, rough movement and hisses, and Bellamy can’t help but watch as he tears the thing away from him and throws it to the floor, his arm hanging awkwardly by his side as he feeds it into the sleeve of a loose navy blue sweatshirt. He uses his other arm to pull the shirt over his head, but when he tries to pull his good arm inside, the sweatshirt continuously rides up and bunches above shoulders again. He tries again, and again, and again. And again.

And again.

Bellamy, with a resigned sigh, crosses the room while Murphy’s back is turned, clutches his elbow while holding the neck of the shirt open wider to pull it over the brunet’s head, as his good arm slides into the sleeve. Murphy, surprisingly, lets it happen without much of a fuss.

He’s lean and blindingly pale, Bellamy notices helplessly as he’s rolling the fabric down over Murphy’s torso, a final unnecessary act of assistance, and if he looks further down, the tails of a few scars rear their mean little heads into view around the outer parts of his thigh. Bellamy tries not to see anything he isn’t meant to see. There were good days and bad days. Lots of bad days. Things are better now, though, and that’s enough to let him blink back up to the back of Murphy’s head as he adjusts the shirt himself.

“Good?” Bellamy asks, and Murphy nods, face burning red and lips pressed into a hard line.

“No beer stains,” he observes/compliments, and Murphy slaps his lingering fingers away.

“I don’t wear this one much,” he answers honestly, draping a pair of oversized sweatpants over Bellamy’s shoulder before turning around to dig through the little plastic of chest of drawers in his closet for another pair.

 _They’re seventeen and twenty-three and Mrs. Murphy is forty-three and very, very dead. “Plz co;me o ver fas,t,” Murphy sends. “Are ur parents home? ;)” Bellamy sends back, grinning from his bed as he pulls a shirt on and pats around for his wallet. “Sor,t of;” Murphy replies. When the door opens, there is a navy blue sweatshirt curled into a ball on the cold, slick tiles that’s shaped like Murphy, and the kitchen reeks of sick._ _And-_ yeah. Good days and bad days.

Murphy’s digging blindly and a little too ferociously through the clothes. Bellamy crouches next to him, touches the inside of his wrist. “Okay?”

Murphy breathes. “Yeah, I didn’t realize, just-” he inhales, hard and sharp. “Just help me get this off.”

Bellamy helps. Murphy puts the hospital gown back on instead and leaves, goes to the living room and lies face down in the pillows on his foldout couch. Bellamy puts on pants in the saddest way one can put on pants, and asks Jasper through the door if he needs someone to hold his hair back.

Murphy doesn’t laugh.

Being in everything sucks.

*******

“Jas, you moving in?” Murphy mumbles after a mostly-silent hour of them blankly watching the news, the weather, public access fishing, crammed together on Murphy’s futon bed, trying to feel normal.

Jasper blinks. He’s got nowhere to go. Bellamy’s leaving town. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Murphy’s mouth is hidden in the pillow, but his cheeks bubble out and his ears perk up a little and Bellamy feels feather-light.

“How about you, Bell?” Murphy mutters, muffled, and oh, never mind everything Bellamy just thought.

“Hard pass, thanks.”

“Shame,” Murphy sighs, turning his head in the pillow so his forehead touches against Bellamy’s hip. "La casa de Murphy is a real hoot."

Hours come and go and in the bluish moon-glow of night and a flickering television they clink their beers together, still tangled up in the sheets and scratchy blankets on Murphy’s bed, Jasper giggling into the syrup-colored rim of his bottle before Bellamy finally cracks and asks him “What’s so funny?”

And Jasper answers, simply, cryptically, “He was right. We’re in the dirt.”

Murphy and Bellamy exchange questioning looks, but everyone is too goddamn tired to ask him what the fuck that means.

*******

It’s been a month. Murphy makes three coffees every morning.

“I found this briefcase in the ditch at the Kangaroo. Feliz Navidad, bitch,” Murphy announces as he bursts into the house, door squeaking closed painfully behind him as he slams the briefcase down on the kitchen table that croaks under the attack. The case’s handle is nearly detached, the leather covering ripping at the seams and the whole thing smells a little like dead dog, but Murphy’s proud of himself.

There’s silence from the den, and Murphy flicks his keys onto the counter as he creeps through the kitchenette and peers around the corner. Bellamy’s folded up on the couch like a broken lawn chair, washing down a few too many Advil with a beer and palming at his temples.

“The least you could do is thank me, Professor.”

Bellamy sinks down against the back of the futon that never folds up and shakes his head, covering his closed eyes with a wide hand.

“What’s up your ass?” Murphy presses, but his voice falters as he steps forward and slides onto the couch beside him, gathers the laptop between his legs.

_“Dear Mr. Blake,_

_Thank you for your commitment to your teaching position at Ark College. We are sorry to inform you that due to the arising of new information regarding your criminal record, we will have to give this opening in the next semester’s staff to another applicant._

_Thank you for your interest in our school. We wish you the best of luck in your future employment.”_

Murphy closes the laptop slowly and pushes it away from them. When he looks at Bellamy, the other man is staring at the blank TV with a cold expression.

“You happy now?”

“You think I wanted this?”

Bellamy looks at him with dry eyes and a scowl. “Didn’t you?”

Murphy doesn’t come back home that afternoon to make them dinner. Jasper orders a pizza, eats it alone on the front steps when Bellamy locks himself in Murphy’s bedroom and doesn’t come out.

In the morning, there are three coffees on the kitchen table and Murphy’s screaming obscenities as Bellamy accidentally shoves him off of the porch, mahogany dresser teetering over and cracking a rotten wooden plank or two in half.

Jasper empties the rest of his flask into the coffee mug, spends the rest of the day piling stacks of mythology books and framed photos of Octavia into the corner of the living room.

Bellamy falls asleep in his own clothes, wrapped around Murphy in the rough, green, plaid futon bed like a blanket. Jasper sleeps in a recliner they found on the side of the road, and the little woman trapped in the weather channel whispers that this week will be a sunny one.

There are good days and bad days.

_******* _

They’re twenty-seven and twenty-two and twenty-one and it’s a Sunday morning in February.

The bookstore has treated Bellamy kindly, and Jasper’s a flourishing bartender.

They could afford a nicer place between their three incomes, maybe a flat with at least three beds. But- you know. Home is home.

Bellamy rolls onto his stomach in the morning, squints into the kitchenette from the futon. Murphy turns on his side, tugging groggily at Bellamy’s shirt to make him lay back down, and the springs creak noisily in similar protest as he does so.

“It’s twelve, Murph. C’mon sunshine,” Bellamy ruffles his hair more roughly than affectionately. “Up, let’s go,” he presses, smacking the back of his hand against Murphy’s cheek. Murphy wrinkles his nose up and groans, eyes squeezing together hard enough to look like wrinkly little walnuts.

“Fuck you,” he grumbles, and he keeps the blinds open all the time now, so Murphy rises and slumps over, holding his face away from the light but he’s still smoothed over in honey rays from a sun that must be thinking about loving them again. 

"I love you," Bellamy blurts out, and Murphy clambers out of bed and tugs his wrinkled sleeping shirt down over his knees again.

"I know," he answers, padding around the futon and making his way to the kitchen. Bellamy catches his hand as he passes by.

"No, I mean-" He kisses him, cupping the back of Murphy's head before the latter responds, presses back, cold nose brushing against Bellamy's cheek.

It's nothing impressive, awkward, tastes bad, and Murphy laughs a little with his chin tucked into his neck, says, "'Bout time," and then makes a bowl of cereal like it wasn't even a big deal. Like nothing is different.

Bellamy thought it would be earth-shattering, realizing he loved Murphy in more confusing ways. But Hell doesn’t open up and swallow Bellamy whole, and fireworks don’t go off outside their windows, and his head doesn’t catch on fire. The coffee machine grumbles and Jasper is taking an audible shit in the bathroom and the streetlights stay off and nobody seems to care at all.

Bellamy excuses himself for some fresh air and plants his feet on the front porch, gives a two finger salute to the earth that couldn’t even bother to _do something_ after all the shit it put them through.

They are not the sun and the moon, not streetlights and power lines, or astronauts and the cosmos, or Caesar and Christ, or cobblestone and rose bushes, or fast cars and oak trees.

They’re twenty-seven and twenty-two and it’s a Sunday morning in February.

And nothing is different.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay i wrote this chapter like fifty times and deleted it sixty times and the conclusion made me so angry and confused that i cried i have no idea what im doing im just tired of looking at it. it doesnt make sense. this fic doesnt make sense i lost any sort of theme i give up i tried.
> 
> it's over that's cancelled
> 
> anyways !! thank u so much for reading and commenting and suffering through it. ive never written a chapter fic this long (eight chapter isnt impressive, jen, chill out) so hey, what a ride, i LOVE all of you people and am so grateful for ur support not to be squishy but im like. i am 16 i have taken ONE creative writing class and i played coolmathgames the whole time so i genuinely am getting all of my practice from Here and its amazing that i have this feedback from u guys to figure out kind of what im up to so thank you so so so much <3
> 
> p.s. you should know that i have never dated anyone or eaten ONE beer or been hospitalized past the age of 0 so i had no idea what the FUCK i was talking about in this fic at any point and if it shows i apologize

**Author's Note:**

> just one, he said. it'll be fun, he said.


End file.
